Course Textbook

Abraham Silberschatz, Peter Baer Galvin, Greg Gagne: Operating System Concepts 10th edition, Wiley, 2018.

Note, that there is an International and a US version of the book. It should not be important if you use the US or the international version.

Course-Specific Instructions

For the programming projects you need access to a computer or virtual machine running Linux. If you have a computer that runs Linux, you can use that. Other options are to use remote access to the IMADA virtual computer lab or to install a virtual machine on your own computer (running a potentially different operating system).

• IMADA virtual computer lab
• Installing a virtual machine

In the projects we are using User-Mode Linux. A guide on getting started with it can be found below.

• User-Mode Linux

For the projects you also need to get familiar with system calls in linux. Below is a guideline on implementing a trivial system call

• System call in linux

Command-line tools, programs, and examples used in course

Below is a (growing) overview of Linux tools (mostly command-line) used throughout the lectures.

• file tree navigation and modification in command line: cd to change the current directory, ls to list contents of current directory, mv to move a file, mkdir to create a new directory, rm to remove a file or directory.
• more navigation: pushd <dir> works like cd, but it saves previous directory and we can go back using popd.
• links: create a hard link with ln and soft link with ln -s.
• file access and modification: cat prints out contents of file, vi (advanced) and nano (simple) are useful command line text editors. > can be used to write into a file, e.g. echo "hello" > samplefile.
• system status: top monitors resource usage of various processes (CPU, memory, etc.)
• processes: ps -e lists current processes. pstree displays the parent-child relationships of processes as a tree. cat /proc/<pid>/status displays status information about a process (for example, number of context swithes)
• pipes: using the | symbol we can forward the output of one process to the input of the other. For example, cat test.txt | grep "42" prints all lines of the file test.txt that contain 42. mkfifo <name> creates a named pipe in the filesystem into which processes can read and write
• time <command>: executes command and outputs time used for it
• processor information: cat /proc/cpuinfo outputs various information about CPU architecture
• bpftrace: tracing tool for Unix/Linux systems
• scheduling/priority: renice -n <niceness> <pid> changes the niceness of a process (which affects directly the scheduling priority). nice -n <niceness> <command> runs <command> with the specified niceness.
• network: nc <ipaddress> <port> establishes tcp connection. ifconfig shows network card status, e.g. ip address and MAC address.
• communication:
  • Producer-consumer with shared memory: shm-producer.c, shm-consumer.c
  • Producer-consumer with named pipe (create pipe first with mkfifo dm510_fifo): np-producer.c, np-consumer.c
  • Producer-consumer with ordinary pipe: op-producer-consumer.c
• parallelization:
  • sequential matrix multiplication: mat-mult.c
  • two separate matrix multiplications in two separate threads pthread.c
  • OpenMP parallelization of matrix multiplication (compile with gcc -fopenmp) openmp.c
  • Using SIMD instructions for matrix multiplication sse.c
• synchronization:
  • via OpenMP: crit-section.c
  • via pthread mutex: mutex.c
  • via atomic instructions (compare-and-exchange): atomic.c
• device access:
  • Random access via lseek: seek.c
  • Random access via mmap: mmap.c

Exams

Exam from June 2025, including answers: exam1.pdf