Summary of G677 – Advanced Operating Systems
This subject is Advanced Operating Systems (course code G677), an optional fourth-year course in the Degree in Computer Systems Engineering at the Faculty of Sciences, University of Cantabria, for academic year 2025–2026. It carries 6 ECTS credits, is taught face-to-face in Spanish, and is coordinated by Valentín Puente Varona.
Scope and aims
The course focuses on the main design goals of operating systems and on the mechanisms used to provide virtualization, concurrency, and persistence. Its stated objectives are for students to understand why these properties are necessary in modern operating systems, which abstractions provide them, and, at a first level, how the supporting mechanisms are implemented.
Learning outcomes
Students are expected to understand the fundamental design goals of an operating system and how those goals shape implementation decisions. They should also understand how the operating system virtualizes resources, enables concurrency, and guarantees persistence.
Program content
The syllabus is organized around four main blocks plus a laboratory component.
- Introduction: rationale and design goals of an operating system.
- Virtualization: processes, APIs, limited direct execution, scheduling policies, multiprocessor scheduling, address spaces, memory translation, segmentation, free-space management, TLBs, paging, and virtual memory mechanisms and policies.
- Thread concurrency: threads and their API, locks, condition variables, semaphores, concurrency bugs, and event-based concurrency.
- Persistence: I/O devices, HDDs and SSDs, files and directories, file-system implementation, FFS consistency, journaling, log-based file systems, and data integrity and security.
- Labs: environment setup; xv6 system calls; MLFQ scheduler implementation; shared-page support; thread support; and small-file optimization in the xv6 file system.
Teaching materials
The basic bibliography listed is Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces by Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau and Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau, published in March 2015.