Operating Systems

Understand the role of an OS as a resource manager and abstraction layer between hardware and user programs.

Trace the evolution from batch systems to modern multi-user, networked operating systems.

Compare monolithic kernels, microkernels, hybrid kernels, and exokernels and understand their design tradeoffs.

Learn how user programs request OS services through system calls and the user-mode/kernel-mode boundary.

Understand process states, PCBs, context switching, and how the OS creates and terminates processes.

Learn the difference between processes and threads, user-level vs kernel-level threads, and threading models.

Explore IPC mechanisms including pipes, message queues, shared memory, and signals.

Study FCFS, SJF, Round Robin, priority scheduling, and multi-level feedback queues.

Understand how concurrent access to shared data causes race conditions and why mutual exclusion is needed.

Learn the fundamental synchronization primitives and how they enforce safe concurrent access.

Work through producer-consumer, readers-writers, and dining philosophers to build synchronization intuition.

Understand the four conditions for deadlock, resource allocation graphs, and strategies to prevent or recover from deadlocks.

Understand the memory hierarchy from registers to disk and how the OS provides each process its own address space.

Learn how paging eliminates external fragmentation and how page tables translate virtual to physical addresses.

Understand how the OS uses disk as an extension of RAM, handling page faults and swap space.

Compare FIFO, LRU, Clock, and optimal page replacement strategies and their impact on performance.

Learn how segmentation provides logical memory divisions and how the OS enforces memory protection between processes.

Understand the file abstraction, directory structures, hard/soft links, and how metadata is stored.

Learn about inodes, FAT, extent-based allocation, journaling, and how data is laid out on disk.

Study disk scheduling algorithms (SCAN, C-SCAN, SSTF) and how the OS optimizes storage I/O.

Explore ext4, NTFS, ZFS, and Btrfs — their features like copy-on-write, snapshots, and checksumming.

Understand how the OS abstracts hardware devices through a layered I/O subsystem and device drivers.

Learn how interrupts and Direct Memory Access enable efficient communication between CPU and devices.

Understand user authentication, access control lists, capability-based security, and the principle of least privilege.

Study buffer overflows, privilege escalation, rootkits, and OS-level defenses like ASLR, DEP, and sandboxing.

Learn how hypervisors enable multiple OS instances on one machine and the difference between Type 1 and Type 2 virtualization.

Understand how namespaces, cgroups, and container runtimes provide lightweight isolation without full VMs.

Explore how OS principles extend to distributed systems — remote procedure calls, distributed file systems, and cluster scheduling.