IT308 - Operating Systems
(OS)

Lectures -- 3 hours per week & lab 4 hours/week

(core course for third year BTech students)

Course objectives :

The course introduces students to the structure, functions and performance issues related to present-day operating systems. During the course, students learn how an operating system addresses the problems of efficient resource management with respect to the various hardware and software resources in a computer system. Illustrative examples are based on (a) UNIX and its variants, and (b) MS Windows, while lab exercises are based mostly on LINUX.

List of topics :

Overview and basic concepts: Two views of an operating system; main functions; application program interface; command interpreter. Processes and threads; inter-process communication; scheduling; deadlocks and strategies of dealing with deadlocks. Memory management; input and output; file systems; security issues; special purpose operating systems.

Reference book and other material :

‘Modern Operating Systems’, by Andrew Tanenbaum, Prentice-Hall.

‘UNIX System Programming’, by Haviland, Gray and Salama, Addison Wesley.

On-line documentation of LINUX.