Advanced Operating Systems

3 units

This course offers an in-depth hands-on exploration of advanced uses of key OS abstractions, mechanisms and policies, with an increasing focus on understanding and evaluating their behaviors and interactions. Readings, lecture material, studio exercises, and a semester-long project chosen by students are closely integrated in an active-learning environment in which students gain experience and proficiency writing, tracing, and evaluating user-space and kernel-space code. Topics include how memory, processes and threads, virtual file systems, and other mechanisms can be used by hypervisors, containers, and other advanced OS abstractions, as well as forensic techniques for examining and managing system behavior.