Computer Science 432 Operating Systems Williams College Fall 2006

Agenda

• Announcements
  • Not CS, but potentially interesting talk tomorrow night: Shuttle astronaut Stephanie Wilson, Brooks-Rogers, 7 PM.
  • CS Saturday at UMass, 9/30. See Brent.
• Lab 1 Out - due in one week.
• Historical development of Operating Systems
  • Very early systems
  • Multiprogramming batch systems
  • Time sharing systems
  • PCs
  • Today's multiuser workstation/PCs
  • Parallel and distributed systems
  • Real-time systems
  • Handheld systems
• Discussion of Lecture Assignment from Lecture 1
• Processes
  • What is a process?
  • Process states
  • Process Control Block, context switching
  • Process creation, fork() system call

Lecture Assignment

Due at the start of class, Thursday, September 14.

Turn in short answers to these questions. Please turn in a hard copy (typeset or handwritten are OK). We will discuss these questions at the start of class on Thursday, so no late submissions are accepted.

SG&G 3.2, 3.4.

The readings for Thursday are in SG&G Chapter 4. Again, concentrate on the Unix examples rather than the Windows ones.

Examples

Many examples will be placed in /usr/cs-local/share/cs432/examples on the Unix lab systems.

• FreeBSD Process Control Block: see /usr/src/sys/sys/proc.h (line 495) and /usr/src/sys/sys/user.h (line 204) for architecture-independent parts of the structure, /usr/src/sys/i386/pcb.h for the i386-specific parts.