COMP20180 Intro to Operating Systems

Academic Year 2020/2021

The course is a general introduction to operating systems, with an emphasis on fundamental techniques underlying modern general-purpose operating systems. References to actual systems are also made at different points in order to illustrate concepts and/or implementation issues. The course starts with a brief review of the history of operating systems, and a discussion of their main design issues and philosophies. This is followed by the study of the important concept of a process, which encompasses the execution context of programs. Afterwards, we study the concept of process scheduling. We then study memory management, with special emphasis on the concepts of paging and virtual memory. After introducing the concept of threads, we are lead to the subject of how processes and threads communicate, cooperate and synchronise, and to the topic of deadlock. Finally, file systems are covered.

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Curricular information is subject to change

Learning Outcomes:

- Know what an operating system is, and why operating systems are studied as a subject matter.

- Understand the concepts of process and thread.

- Understand process/thread scheduling, and the main techniques and issues involved.

- Understand memory management, with an emphasis on virtual memory.

- Understand the techniques associated to process synchronisation, and associated issues such as deadlock.

- Understand the mechanisms underlying file systems.

- Understand the overall complexity of designing an operating system.

Indicative Module Content:

(see above)

Student Effort Hours: 
Student Effort Type Hours
Lectures

22
Tutorial

16
Autonomous Student Learning

76
Total

114
Approaches to Teaching and Learning:
Reflective learning
Enquiry & problem-based learning 
Requirements, Exclusions and Recommendations
Learning Recommendations:

The students are expected to have knowledge of programming and data structures equivalent to that acquired in the Computer Science modules offered in these areas in levels 1 and 2.


Module Requisites and Incompatibles
Not applicable to this module.
 
Assessment Strategy  
Description Timing Open Book Exam Component Scale Must Pass Component % of Final Grade
Assignment: Questions and exercises to be completed by the students. Throughout the Trimester n/a Other No

40
Examination: End of semester examination. 2 hour End of Trimester Exam No Other Yes

60

Carry forward of passed components
Yes
 
Resit In Terminal Exam
Autumn Yes - 2 Hour
Please see Student Jargon Buster for more information about remediation types and timing. 
Feedback Strategy/Strategies

• Feedback individually to students, post-assessment

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