electiveHQ

The course is an introduction to operating systems, with an emphasis on fundamental principles underlying modern general-purpose operating systems. The course is based on exploring and modifying a teaching operating system running on a simulated RISC-V computer. References to popular operating systems are also made at different points in order to illustrate concepts and/or implementation issues. The course starts with an introduction to “bare metal” programming using a combination of C and RISC-V assembly languages. The important concepts and historic developments related to Operating Systems are then introduced using a combination of lectures, historic videos, and practical assignments in which students develop extensions to the teaching operating system. These concepts include interrupts, executable file, execution context switching, process, system call, driver, file system, Unix system call API and shell language, process scheduling, virtual memory, interprocess synchronisation and communication.