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CS3 OS - Schedule of Examinable Material 2014-15

NOT FINAL: this is for information only; the schedule may be modified until the end of the course.

In general, you are expected to know the material on the lecture slides in reasonable detail. In terms of factual knowledge, the slides more or less suffice; the required reading (posted on the course web page) should serve to help you explain and apply the knowledge. As part of the practical, you were asked to study the general architecture of the Linux kernel, which will not be examinable to avoid penalising you twice.

Here is a quick tour through the course, with a bit more detail on what I consider examinable.

• History of computers. This is not examinable in itself, although you may care to illustrate some answers with historical comments if you wish.
• Computer Architecture. You should know the general architecture of modern computers at the level of the slides.
• OS components and structure. General knowledge at the level of the slides; OS protection concepts and their hardware implementations.
• Processes and threads. As on slides and required reading.
• Concurrency etc. As on slides and required reading. In particular, you should be able to know the principles and implementation of locks and semaphores.
• Deadlock. As on slides and required reading.
• Scheduling; SMP. As on slides and required reading.
• Memory management. As on slides and required reading.
• Secondary Storage. As on slides and required reading.
• File System. As on slides and required reading.
• Cloud Computing. This is not examinable.