About Me

Professor Craton

Anything you want to know?

Introductions

• Name
• Major(s)
• Favorite thing you did over break?

Syllabus

Link

Quizzes

• Given regularly at beginning and end of class
• Should be easy for you
• Allow me to confirm that everyone is keeping up with course material

Labs

• Code-based labs that do not parse or compile will be awarded zero credit
• Outside resources are acceptable e.g. Stack Overflow, etc
• Help from peers is acceptable
• Your solution must be yours, and you must fully understand it

Lab Grading

• Most labs will be graded for correctness and code quality, as in other courses
• Labs may occasionally be graded orally at my discretion

What does the OS do?

• Handles concurrency to share hardware between tasks
• Manages interactions between tasks
• May support high-level interactions (files, etc)
• Connecting to other systems

Can we have a computer without an operating system?

Abstraction

• Provides application programs with an abstract view of underlying hardware
• Manages low-level details

Application Programming Interface

• API
• All OS features made available to application programs
• Run programs, open files, create network connections, etc

Kernel

• Core of the operating system
• Provides programmatic interfaces
• Typically has no direct visibility from the user

Shell

• Provides a way for users to interact with the kernel
• Usually provides a way to start programs
• sh, tcsh, bash

Desktop Environments

• Creates a graphical shell for the user
• Provides similar features as a text-based shell
• KDE, GNOME, Explorer