tvottra / operating-systems-reading

Monographs created for my operating systems course

These are readings (beyond the text and Wikipedia articles) that I have collected for the Operating Systems Principles course (UCLA CS111, HMC CS134):

• most are articles that I have written ... these are available for use by anyone who finds them useful.
• there are several articles on security-related topics, written by Peter Reiher (UCLA). Please contact him if you are interested in using them.
• a few are (pubically posted) overview articles written by others, which I have copied here only to give them stable URLs.

My articles:

• general topics in operating systems

  • principles.html ... an introduction to (general) principles about software that we can learn from the study of Operating Systems.
  • interfaces.html ... an introduction to interface standardization and standards conformance.
  • stability.html ... a discussion of the importance of interface stability, emphasizing interface/implementation separation.
  • linkage.html ... an introduction to stack frames and linkage conventions.
  • objmods.html ... an introduction to object modules (where they come from and what they contain).
  • ObjectModulesLinkageEditingandLibraries.pdf ... a discussion of linkage editing and (what is involved in) program loading.
  • loadstress.html ... an introduction to goals and approaches to load and stress testing.
  • monitoring.html ... an introduction to the concept of Health Monitoring, and dealing with detected failures.

• file systems

  • filetypes.html ... an introduction to different types of files (e.g. sequential, directories) and their attributes.
  • ipc.html ... a high level introduction to (user-level) inter-process communication mechanisms.
  • gc_defrag.html ... a discussion of garbage collection and defragmentation
  • BSD/bsd.html ... an overview of the (relatively original) 4BSD Fast File system, interesting for (head-motion optimizing) cylinder clusters, symbolic links, and long file names.
    • the FREEBSD sub-directory includes copies of (open source) header files for the basic file system data structures.
  • BSD/EXT3.html ... an overview of the (much newer) Linux EXT3 file system.
  • DOS/dos.html ... an overview of the (original and extended) DOS FAT file systems, interesting for its simplicity, and very different approaches to directory structure and block allocation.
    • the OPENSOLARIS sub-directory includes a copy of an (open source) header file for the FDISK table (used by many operating systems) to partition disks.
  • MVS/mvs.html ... an overview of the (venerable) IBM System/360 file systems, interesting for their support of large contiguous extents.
  • VSAM/vsam.html ... an overview of the (only slightly less ancient) IBM VSAM file structure, interesting as a (simple but crude) illustration of how to indexed key-structured data.

• distributed systems

  • distsystems.html ... an introduction to why we build distributed systems, and why they are hard to build.
  • authservers.html ... an introduction to authentication/authorization as a service, using Kerberos Work-Tickets as an example.
  • clusterconcepts.html ... an introduction to fundamental concepts in clustered computing (membership, coupling, redundancy, heart-beats, split-brain, quorum, and fencing).
  • horizontal.html ... an introduction to the concept of horizontally scalable systems (and a lead-in to cloud computing).

• Synchronization

  • avoidance.html ... a brief introduction to Deadlock Avoidance (as distinguished from Deadlock Prevention).
  • inversion.html ... a brief introduction to the problem of Priority Inversion, its detection, and dealing with it.
  • leases.html ... an introduction to the motivations for (and use of) leases (vs locks).

• OS internals

  • dynamicmodules.html ... a discussion of dynamically loadable kernel modules, the steps involved, and their applicability to hot-plugging and other dynamically loaded services.
  • driverclasses.html ... a discussion of (UNIX) classes of device drivers (drivers that implement the same interfaces and abstractions).
  • multiprocessor.html ... an introduction to Symmetric Multi-Processor computers, problems (e.g. cache coherence) and how they affect operating systems design (scheduling, synchronization, I/O, memory allocation).
  • realtime.html ... an introduction to Real-Time systems, requirements, and scheduling.
  • usermodethreads.html ... a discussion of how threads can be implemented entirely in user-mode, and how this differs (in structure and capability) from kernel-mode implemetnations (I find this useful in a discussion of scheduling and context-switching).
  • workingsets.html ... a discussion of the performance risks associated with demand paging and the use of working sets to address them.

Peter Reiher's articles:

• Reiher/Security_introduction.pdf ... an introduction to the basic goals of the security mechanisms to be supported by an operating system, and the basic principles involved in defining and developing security enforcement mechanisms.
• Reiher/authentication.pdf ... an introduction to the general concept of authentication, and a (very general) overview of the approaches to achieving it.
• Reiher/access_control.pdf ... an introduction to the general concept of access control, and a discussion of the general approaches (Access Control Lists and Capabilities) of defining its rules.
• Reiher/cryptography.pdf ... a general introduction to symmetric and Public Key encryption, and at-rest data encryption.
• Reiher/Distributed_systems_security.pdf ... an introduction to the added complexities of authentication in distributed systems, specific discussions of the use of Public Key, password authentication, and SSL/TLS, and an overview of higher level applications (HTTPS and SSH).
• Reiher/perf.pdf ... an introdction to performance measurement (metrics, choosing the right statistics, obtaining comparable results), the general causes of performance problems, and common mistakes in performance measurement.

Other People's articles I have made copies of:

• KERBEROS/kerberos.html ... an IEEE article by Neuman and Ts'o, introducing the Kerberos authentication service.
• PUBKEY/pubkey.html ... a more detailed introduction to Public Key Encryption, signatures, and certificates from (long gone) Netscape.