Think OS: A Brief Introduction to Operating Systems

Allen B. Downey

Version 0.7.4

Copyright 2015 Allen B. Downey

Permission is granted to copy, distribute, and/or modify this document under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Unported License, which is available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/.

• Preface
  • A note on this draft
  • Using the code
  • Contributor List
• Contents
• Compilation
  • Compiled and interpreted languages
  • Static types
  • The compilation process
  • Object code
  • Assembly code
  • Preprocessing
  • Understanding errors
• Processes
  • Abstraction and virtualization
  • Isolation
  • UNIX processes
• Virtual memory
  • A bit of information theory
  • Memory and storage
  • Address spaces
  • Memory segments
  • Static local variables
  • Address translation
• Files and file systems
  • Disk performance
  • Disk metadata
  • Block allocation
  • Everything is a file?
• More bits and bytes
  • Representing integers
  • Bitwise operators
  • Representing floating-point numbers
  • Unions and memory errors
  • Representing strings
• Memory management
  • Memory errors
  • Memory leaks
  • Implementation
• Caching
  • How programs run
  • Cache performance
  • Locality
  • Measuring cache performance
  • Programming for cache performance
  • The memory hierarchy
  • Caching policy
  • Paging
• Multitasking
  • Hardware state
  • Context switching
  • The process life cycle
  • Scheduling
  • Real-time scheduling
• Threads
  • Creating threads
  • Creating threads
  • Joining threads
  • Synchronization errors
  • Mutex
• Condition variables
  • The work queue
  • Producers and consumers
  • Mutual exclusion
  • Condition variables
  • Condition variable implementation
• Semaphores in C
  • POSIX Semaphores
  • Producers and consumers with semaphores
  • Make your own semaphores

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