Operating Systems

Operating-system design from the kernel boundary up: processes, threads, scheduling, synchronisation, memory, and I/O. Some pages are study plans for topics not yet written.

Type
Topic overview
Updated
Known gaps (1)
  • Not yet addressed from the September 2026 site review. Topic contains two Address Space routes and study to-do pages; lead with foundations-first path.

Contents

Read the overview

Unmarked notes are working notes: public, not yet reviewed.

Here, we focus on going into the core ideas behind operating systems and how we can make use of these ideas in the solutions we build.

A Stroll Through OS Concepts

Operating Systems Core

🔏 Things to go through

Here are some ideas about operating systems that you should go through later:

MirageOS
Hypervisors
Zen

Resources

Textbooks (start here)

  • Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces (Arpaci-Dusseau) : free at ostep.org. This is your main text for the core topics. Written exactly at the conceptual level you need, with simulation homework.
  • Modern Operating Systems (Tanenbaum) : use alongside OSTEP for a second perspective and stronger coverage of distributed systems.
  • Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms (Tanenbaum & Van Steen) : your main text for the distributed systems module.
  • Computer Security: Art and Science (Bishop) : for the reliability and security module.

Seminal papers to read alongside each module

  • Basics: Ritchie & Thompson, The UNIX Time-Sharing System (1974)
  • Concurrency: Dijkstra's semaphore paper; Lamport's bakery algorithm
  • Address Space: Denning, The Working Set Model for Program Behavior (1968)
  • File Systems: McKusick et al., A Fast File System for UNIX; Rosenblum & Ousterhout, The Design and Implementation of a Log-Structured File System
  • Distributed: Lamport, Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events; the Raft paper (Ongaro & Ousterhout, 2014); Dean & Ghemawat, MapReduce
  • Security: Saltzer & Schroeder, The Protection of Information in Computer Systems (1975) : still the canonical reference

Type to search every note and essay.