CS377: Operating System

Course Description: In this course we examine the important problems in operating system design and implementation. The operating system provides a well-known, convenient, and efficient interface between user programs and the bare hardware of the computer on which they run. The operating system is responsible for allowing resources (e.g., disks, networks, and processors) to be shared, providing common services needed by many different programs (e.g., file service, the ability to start or stop processes, and access to the printer), and protecting individual programs from one another. The course will start with a brief historical perspective of the evolution of operating systems over the last fifty years, and then cover the major components of most operating systems. This discussion will cover the tradeoffs that can be made between performance and functionality during the design and implementation of an operating system. Particular emphasis will be given to three major OS subsystems: process management (processes, threads, CPU scheduling, synchronization, and deadlock), memory management (segmentation, paging, swapping), file systems, and operating system support for distributed systems.

My Course Reflection

I took this course in Fall 2022. Excellent class taught by Professor Tim Richards. A lot more in depth than I expected. I learned about virtualization, memory management, multhreading with semophores and mutexes, and file systems. One of the most fun project I did was the Producer and Consumer, which is a classic problem in multithreading. Multiple producer produces items and put them into a buffer, and multiple consumer consumes the items from the buffer. Ensuring that the producer and consumer do not access the buffer at the same time using semophores and mutexes.

Code demonstration for Shell Program

void simple_shell::parse_command(char *cmd, char **cmdTokens)