ECE344 — Operating Systems

Course covers operating systems and systems programming with a focus on Linux and UNIX-based systems. Followed by ECE454 — Computer Systems Programming.

Concepts covered

Core concepts

• Process
  • Process control blocks
  • Process states (blocking, zombie, orphan)
  • Inter-process communication
    • Pipes
    • Signals
    • Sockets
• Kernel
  • Syscall (Linux syscalls)
    • read and write (operating on file descriptors)
    • exit and exit_group (exit statuses)
    • fork (spawning processes)
    • execve and execlp (replacing processes with other programs)
    • wait and waitpid (cleaning up child processes)
    • sleep (time blocking)
    • pipe (creates a bidirectional pipe)
    • dup and dup2 (duplicating file descriptors)
    • mmap (file to virtual memory mapping)
  • Linux
• Virtual memory
  • Segmentation
  • Page table (page faults, computations)
  • Memory management unit
  • Translation lookaside buffer
• Scheduler
  • Round-robin scheduling
  • Fair scheduling
  • Multiprocessor scheduling
• Thread (pthread)
  • Detached, joinable threads
  • Threading libraries (many-to-one, one-to-one, many-to-many)
  • Thread pool
  • Multithreading and parallelisation
    • Race condition
    • Atomics
    • Mutex
    • Semaphore

Extra concepts

• Instruction set architecture (amd64, aarch64, rv64gc)
  • CPU privilege modes
• Application binary interface (ABIs)
  • x86-64 ABI
  • .elf (executable files)
• Library
  • Static/dynamic libraries
  • Semantic versioning
• Intermediate representation

Tools

• Windows Subsystem for Linux
• Docker
• Meson
• Linux utilities
  • strace (syscalls)
  • ldd (dynamic libraries)
  • Valgrind (dynamic memory allocation)
  • man (documentation manuals)
  • htop (processes)

Extra notes

To compile with Meson:

meson setup build
meson compile -C build

Quick links:

• Class materials
• Lecture slides
• Lab specifications