As mentioned in my first post this morning, today marks the first day of Fall 2020 and I’m taking advanced operating systems (AOS), a systems class I’ve had a burning desire to take close to two years ago.
The first assignment assigned in course is a pre-assessment, consisting of 22 yes/no answers, designed to to “gauge readiness for this graduate-level Advanced Operating Systems course”. I filled out this document (screenshot below) and my answers are mixed but overall I’m pretty prepared. Of the 22 questions, I answered “yes” to 18 of them, “no” to four. Based off of that, I’m about 81% prepared for this course.
According to the pre-assessment, the four areas that I need brushing up on are:
- Do you know the conditions under which a process/thread may join the ready queue and leave the ready queue? Not really … I do recall studying light weight processor (LWP) but cannot remember the details of thread management
- Can you name all the steps that happen during a context switch? I remember some of the steps, but not all. I know that the operating system must save the process into a process control block (PCB) during a context switch, the PCB containing all the metadata about the running process.
- Do you under the difference between a “segment” and a “page” in a memory hierarchy? Sort of … but no, not really
- Do you know the difference between a “page” and a “frame” in a virtual memory system? Does a frame consists of multiple pages …
I’ll keep an eye out for the (above) questions as I start watching the lectures. I believe the first set of lectures focus on reviewing operating system fundamentals.
