Learning Outcomes

Having completed this course you will be able to: - Describe what an Operating System is and its role in a computer system. - Explain why hardware has addresses and the types of addresses. - Describe how processes work. - List the different CPU types a computer can have. - Describe the single contiguous model and the partition mode memory management. - Discuss virtual memory and how it works in a computer system. - Describe segmentation memory management and how it is more logical than virtual memory. - Describe the process of a computer booting up to loading the operating system. - Explain how a process is stored in memory. - Describe how a xv6 system executes and new processes. - List the steps in a hardware interrupt. - Describe how a software interrupt happens. - Describe how a CPU switches between processes. - Describe different methods for scheduling processes. - Discuss schedulers used in Linux. - Describe the different types of inter-process communication. - Explain process synchronization and the critical section. - Discuss possible solutions for multiple processes accessing the critical section. - Explain how the bakery algorithm works. - Discuss how hardware can help with the critical section problem. - Describe how spinlocks, mutexes and semaphores work. - Explain the dining philosopher’s problem. - List the conditions for resource deadlock. - Define what is meant by paralysation. - Explain how threads are used in paralyzation. - Distinguish between threads and processes. - Distinguish between secrecy, integrity, and availability with regard to security goals. - Define what denial of service attacks means. - Explain when access control techniques are used. - Explain information flow policies. - Distinguish between the Biba model and the Bell-LaPadula model. - Define the use of buffer overflows. - Describe how an attacker could create an exploit code. - List some techniques to overcome buffer overflow vulnerability. - Explain 'how return to libc' attacks works.