I'm currently taking an introductory course on operating system concepts, I major in Mechanical Engineering, so it is completely outside of my normal curriculum but I decided to take it as I have a deep interest in the topic.
If some people share the same interest, then I wouldn't mind writing some articles about the theory explained in the course.
A basic outline of the theory:
- Process management ( What IS a process/thread and how do operating systems schedule processes/'jobs' ).
- Multi threaded programming.
- Synchronization issues and how to prevent them.
- Deadlocks.
- Memory management strategies ( Paging, segmentation etc. ).
- Virtual memory management.
( this is where we are in the course right now )
- File Systems
- I/O Systems
- System Protection / security
- Distributed / real-time systems (less interesting for me)
- 'Case studies' of Linux and Windows XP.
There also is a 'practical' part to this course, where we have to hand in assignments that have something to do with one of the above topics. The first assignment is due 12/16/2009 so if people are interested I could post the assignment after this date - so people who are interested can do these assignments as well and learn from it.
Let me know what you think.