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Module details
CO527 Operating Systems and Architecture (15 credits)
Syllabus
This module provides an in-depth understanding of the fundamental behaviour and components (hardware and software) of a typical computer system, and how they collaborate to manage resources and provide services. It will consider systems other than the standard PC running Windows, in order to broaden students' outlook.
The module has two strands: "Operating Systems" and "Architecture", which each form around 50% of the material.
- Operating Systems:
- Review of operating systems principles, and the idea of the operating system as a provider of a virtual machine.
- Structures and types of operating systems; microkernels, layered systems, monolithic systems, relevance to distributed systems.
- Basic kernel components; concurrency; synchronisation and communication; interrupt handling, scheduling, processes and threads.
- Memory management and its relation to the hardware; virtual memory, mechanisms and policies.
- Program environment; virtual machine layout; link editing, link loading, object file formats, dynamic linking. Relocation, position independence. Static and dynamic data areas: stacks, heaps, sharing.
- Filing systems; structures, data, metadata, performance, reliability and robustness. Related issues; backup, archiving, security.
- Miscellaneous issues; bootstrapping, diskless systems, multiprocessors.
- Architecture:
- Processor implementation; a review of the internal structure of processors, including Von Neumann and Harvard architectures.
- Detailed review of a typical contemporary processor, including the block structure of the processor, the register transfers required to realise machine instructions, the stack and its relation to subroutines and interrupts
- Pipelined organisations and an evaluation of their performance.
- Relationship between the code generated by the compiler and the hardware structure to optimise performance.
- Cache memory systems and performance measures for processors.
Note
This web page provides advance information about a module due to run in the coming academic year. We believe the details are accurate at the time of writing but they may be subject to change.