CS552
Operating Systems
Fall 2026

General information:

Class location/time: CAS 213, TTh 3:30-4:45pm
Recommended Text: Any of the following books are in the same equivalence class. I will not require any but they cover the basic concepts:

Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne, "Operating System Concepts," John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 2018 (10th Edition) - ISBN: 978-1-118-06333-0

NOTE: If you have an older version of the above book it will most likely be adequate

This course covers the fundamental concepts of operating systems. Topics including OS structure, processes/thread management, synchronization, deadlocks, file systems, I/O and memory management will be discussed.
A good understanding of C or C++ is required. A prior understanding of assembly programming will be useful, especially x86 assembly, bu this is not prerequisite knowledge.
Advanced topics including those based on distributed computing will be discussed, time permitting. Additionally, case studies based on a real-world operating system (e.g., Linux) will be covered, where appropriate, throughout the course.
You will be required to tackle projects that involve kernel-level programming of existing systems such as Linux, and writing your own OS abstractions/features on bare-bones hardware. In the latter case, we will use PC emulation/virtualization tools such as Bochs, QEMU/KVM, VMWare Workstation/Player and Oracle's VirtualBox.
Several projects may require development and use of our own in-house operating system, called Quest.
Prerequisites: CS210 (or the consent of the instructor).

Linux source code cross reference
"Linux Device Drivers," by Corbet, Kroah-Hartman, and Rubini, O'Reilly . This is useful to understand how kernel modules are implemented in Linux, as well as to find out about synchronization capabilities, interrupt and device management.
The following links are primarily for those curious to know how to write their own operating system:

Lots of info on bootloaders, PC emulators and hardware. This site has come a long way over the years and is very valuable if you want to write your own OS. My research group has used this site a lot.

For those wishing to find out more about PC emulators/virtualizers, the following are particularly relevant:

this has a very good user interface, like VMware's software. For getting up and running this or one of the VMware tools is probably easiest but the ones below are all very good for developing and debugging kernel code.

one of the first x86 PC emulators and still extremely valuable for OS development. Very good for debugging kernel code.

like Bochs, it's very good for developing kernel code. Relatively low-level interface but supports ARM as well as x86.

this is actually a Linux kernel loadable module that exposes the hardware virtualization features of Intel VT and AMD-V processors.

For those wishing to run a virtual machine on an Apple machine, especially those using ARM-based Apple Silicon, this is based on QEMU.

"Understanding the Linux Kernel", Daniel P. Bovet and Marco Cesati, O'Reilly, 2001 (ISBN: 0-596-00002-2),
"Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment", W. Richard Stevens, Addison Wesley, 2000 (ISBN: 0201563177).
"UNIX Network Programming", Volume 1, W. Richard Stevens, Prentice Hall, 1998 (ISBN: 0-13-490012-X).

Useful documentation on the Intel 64 and IA-32 architectures is included in the Software Developer's Manuals. These manuals are split into several volumes, and can be found here.
For help with in-line assembly look here.

August 2026