Course detail

Operating Systems

FIT-IOSAcad. year: 2025/2026

The concept of an operating system (OS) as a part of software of a computer system. Architectures of operating systems, a classification of operating systems. An overview of the contemporary operating systems. The kernel of UNIX, its structure, graphical and textual interfaces, command languages. Process management, context switching, scheduling, interprocess communication. Memory management, paging, virtual memory. Synchronization of processes, semaphores and other synchronization means, deadlock, starvation.

Language of instruction

Czech, English

Number of ECTS credits

Mode of study

Not applicable.

Guarantor

doc. Mgr. Adam Rogalewicz, Ph.D.

Department

Department of Intelligent Systems (UITS)

Entry knowledge

Basic knowledge of programming in C.

Rules for evaluation and completion of the course

The evaluation of the course is composed from the following activities (in total 100 points):

Two home assignments individually solved by the students (max 30 points).
Mid-term exam (max. 10 points).
Final exam (max. 60 points).

Conditions for accreditation:

Minimal gain of 15 points from homeworks and mid-term exam.
All activities counted to accreditation are counted into the final evaluation of the course.

The minimal number of points that must be obtained from the final exam is 27. Otherwise, no points will be assigned to a student.

Aims

The goal is to acquaint students with the principles of operating systems in general and with the basic concepts of the UNIX operating system.
Students are acquainted with the basic principles of operating systems (with emphasis on the UNIX operating system) and they understand the influence of operating systems upon the operation of complex computing systems. Students are able to exploit scripts for solving various tasks in a UNIX-based environment.

Study aids

Not applicable.

Prerequisites and corequisites

recommended prerequisite
Introduction to Software Engineering
recommended prerequisite
Introduction to Programming Systems

Basic literature

Silberschatz, A., Galvin, P.B., Gagne, G.: Operating System Concepts, 10. vydání, John Wiley & Sons, 2018. (CS)

Type of course unit

Lecture

39 hours, compulsory

Teacher / Lecturer

Ing. Aleš Smrčka, Ph.D.
doc. Ing. Ondřej Lengál, Ph.D.
doc. Mgr. Adam Rogalewicz, Ph.D.

Syllabus

Introduction. Evolution of computers and operating systems (OS). Requirements on OS, classification of OS, standards. The basic terminology and the general structure of OS.
The UNIX operating system. The history and the most important development branches. The basic principles and structure of UNIX. The structure of the UNIX kernel, its interface and the different forms of communication with the kernel.
UNIX shell. Basic commands, programs, scripts. Special symbols. Input/output redirection, pipes, background processes, sub-shell. Variables, control structures.
A basic introduction to programming in UNIX. Languages, compilers, principles of linking programs, dynamically linked libraries. Standard utilities of UNIX.
File systems. The physical and logical structure of disks. Types of files, i-nodes, storing files on a disk.
Access rights to files in UNIX, users and groups, the suid and sgid attributes, the typical structure of directories in a UNIX system.
Input and output. The corresponding kernel services. Data structures and algorithms used by the input/output subsystem of the kernel.
Management of processes. The notion of a process, its states, and representation in the system. Loading the system, the init process. The fork, exec, exit, and wait calls.
Basic algorithms of process scheduling.
Mutual exclusion, semaphores and other synchronization means.
Typical synchronization tasks. Deadlocks and dealing with them.
Memory management. Address spaces, address translation, memory pages.
Virtual memory.