Free online courseOperating System

Course Description

Understanding how an operating system works changes the way you troubleshoot computers, write efficient software, and make infrastructure decisions. This free online Operating System course is designed to help you move from surface-level familiarity to a clear, practical grasp of what happens from the moment a machine boots to the moment applications run smoothly (or fail). You will connect foundational theory with the kinds of problems faced in IT support, hardware diagnostics, and programming workflows.

You will start by exploring what an operating system is responsible for and how it organizes the computer system: storage hierarchies, input/output structure, and architectural models used in modern computing environments. From there, you will see how operating systems expose capabilities through services, user interfaces, and system calls, giving programs a safe and consistent way to request work such as file access, process control, and communication.

A major focus is process management and concurrency. You will learn the differences between processes and threads, how process state and control information are tracked, and what really happens during a context switch. As you progress, you will understand how operating systems create and terminate processes, coordinate interprocess communication, and support networked interactions with tools such as sockets and remote procedure calls. These concepts are essential for debugging performance bottlenecks, reasoning about application behavior, and understanding how distributed systems coordinate tasks.

You will also build strong intuition around CPU scheduling and synchronization. By working through practice questions and solved problems, you will strengthen your ability to compare scheduling strategies, interpret key criteria such as responsiveness and turnaround time, and recognize tradeoffs between preemptive and non-preemptive approaches. You will then dive into critical sections, locks, semaphores, monitors, and classic synchronization challenges, developing the mindset needed to prevent race conditions and ensure correctness in concurrent programs.

Finally, the course ties system-level decisions to memory and storage through coverage of main memory, virtual memory, file systems, and mass storage. By the end, you will have a structured mental model of an operating system and the confidence to apply it in technical interviews, academic studies, IT support tasks, and software engineering practice.