Operating Systems | George Mason Department of Computer Science

Primary textbooks: [OSC] Operating System Concepts, 9th Edition, Silberschatz, Galvin, and Gagne, John Wiley, 2012.; [DS] Distributed Systems: concepts and design, 5th edition, Coulouris, Dollimore, and Kindberg, Addison Wesley, 2011.

Additional readings: [VM1] "Virtual machine monitors: current technology and future trends" by M. Rosenblum and T. Garfinkel, IEEE Computer, Vol. 38, No. 5. (May 2005), pp. 39-47.; [VM2] "The Architecture of Virtual Machines" by James E. Smith and Ravi Nair, IEEE Computer, Vol. 38, No. 5. (May 2005), pp. 32-38.; [VM3] "Xen and the Art of Virtualization" by P. Barham et al., Proceedings of the Nineteenth ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP 2003), pp. 164-177; Note: The electronic (pdf) copies of VM1, VM2, and VM3 are available at the IEEE and ACM digital libraries, which can be accessed through the GMU library site (http://library.gmu.edu)

Topics	Description	Readings
Architecture Basics and OS Structures	Computer-System Organization, Computer-System Architecture, Operating-System Structure, Operating-System Operations and Services, Computing Environments, System Calls, OS Design Paradigms, OS Generation, System Boot	OSC Chap. 1 and 2
Process Management	Processes, Threads, CPU Scheduling, Process and Thread Synchronization, Deadlocks	OSC Chap. 3 through 7
Memory Management	Contiguous Allocation, Paging, Segmentation, Virtual Memory, Demand Paging, Page Replacement Algorithms, Thrashing, Memory-Mapped Files, Kernel Memory	OSC Chap. 8 and 9
Storage Management	File-System Interface, File System Implementation, Allocation Methods, Efficiency and Performance Issues, Recovery, NFS, I/O Systems, Mass-Storage Structure, Disk Scheduling, Swap Space, RAID Structure	OSC Chap. 10 through 13
Protection and Security	Access Matrix, Access Control, Program Threats, System and Network Threats, Basic Cryptography, User Authentication	OSC Chap. 14 and 15
Distributed Systems	Fundamentals of Distributed Systems, Communication Structure, Robustness, Distributed File Systems, Time and Global States, Distributed Coordination and Agreement	OSC Chap. 17, DS Chapter 14.1, 14.2, 14.4, 15.1, 15.2, 15.3, 15.5.1
Virtual Machines	Fundamentals of Virtual Machine Technologies, Types of Virtual Machines, Process and System Virtual Machines, Para-virtualization, OS support for Virtual Machines	OSC Chap. 16, VM1, VM2, VM3