ECE344 — Operating Systems

Course covers operating systems and systems programming with a focus on Linux and Unix-based systems. Lab work is done in C. Followed by ECE454 — Computer Systems Programming and ECE419 — Distributed Systems.

Concepts covered

Core concepts

• Process
  • Process control blocks
  • Process states (blocking, zombie, orphan)
  • Inter-process communication
    • Pipes
    • Signals
    • Sockets
• Kernel
  • Syscall
    • read and write (operating on file descriptors)
    • exit and exit_group (exit statuses)
    • opendir and closedir (opening and closing directories)
    • 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)
    • open (opens file)
    • lseek (advances position in file descriptor by offset)
    • flush and sync (flushes a buffer, possibly a filesystem buffer)
  • Linux
• Virtual memory
  • Segmentation
  • Page table (page faults, computations)
  • Memory management unit
  • Translation lookaside buffer
  • Page replacement
    • Optimal, random, FIFO
    • Least recently used
    • Clock replacement
• Scheduler
  • Round-robin scheduling
  • Fair scheduling
  • Multiprocessor scheduling
• Thread and multithreading
  • pthread
    • pthread_create (create thread)
    • pthread_join (join on thread, equivalent of process wait)
    • pthread_exit (exit thread)
    • pthread_detach (mark thread as detached)
  • Threading libraries (many-to-one, one-to-one, many-to-many)
  • Thread pool
  • ucontext
  • Race condition
  • Atomics
  • Mutex (deadlock)
    • pthread_mutex_init
    • pthread_mutex_lock
    • pthread_mutex_unlock
  • Condition variable (monitor)
    • pthread_cond_init
    • pthread_cond_destroy
    • pthread_cond_signal
    • pthread_cond_broadcast
    • pthread_cond_wait
  • Semaphore
    • sem_init
    • sem_destroy
    • sem_wait
    • sem_trywait
    • sem_post
• Persistent storage
  • Solid-state drive (SSD)
  • RAID
• Filesystem
  • Linux filesystem
  • Filesystem allocation
    • Linked allocation
    • File Allocation Table (FAT)
    • Indexed allocation
    • inode
• Memory allocator (and memory fragmentation)
  • alloca (compile-time stack allocation)
  • Heap allocation (runtime heap allocation)
  • Buddy allocator
  • Slab allocator
• Virtual machine

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
• Data structure
  • Concurrent hash tables
  • queue.h (TAILQ)

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