The main objectives of this curricular unit were to provide the fundamental knowledge on:

• the structure and the functioning of an operating system;
• the use of the Application Programming Interface (API) of a real.

The programming language used to develop these projects was C.

• Objectives and functions of an operating system
• Evolution of operating systems; structure of modern operating systems
• Abstractions supported by an operating system and their programming interface
• Hardware support and protection requirements

• Processes and threads; process status
• Scheduling strategies
• Concurrent execution: problems and solutions
• Synchronization mechanisms between processes
• Deadlocks

• Basic memory management: overlays, swapping and partitions
• Virtual memory systems: paging and segmentation
• Implementation of virtual memory; strategies for memory allocation/ release

• Input/output hardware and software
• Abstraction of differences between devices

• File-system interface
• File-system implementation; disk management

• File and directory manipulation.
• Process and thread creation and management.
• Interprocess communication: signals, pipes, FIFOs, and shared memory.
• Process and thread synchronization: semaphores, mutexes and condition variables.