OUTLINE OF THE REST OF THIS BOOK

We have now completed our introduction and bird’s-eye view of the operating system. It is time to get down to the details. Chapter 2 is about processes. It discusses their properties and how they communicate with one another. It also gives a number of detailed examples of how interprocess communication works and how to avoid some of the pitfalls.

Chapter 3 is about deadlocks. We briefly showed what deadlocks are in this chapter, but there is much more to say. Ways to prevent or avoid them are discussed.

In Chap. 4 we will study memory management in detail. The important topic of virtual memory will be examined, along with closely related concepts such as paging and segmentation.

Input/Output is covered in Chap. 5. The concepts of device independence and device dependence will be looked at. Several important devices, including disks, keyboards, and displays, will be used as examples.

Then, in Chap, 6, we come to the all-important topic of file systems. To a considerable extent, what the user sees is largely the file system. We will look at both the file system interface and the file system implementation.

At this point we will have completed our study of the basic principles of single-CPU operating systems. However, there is more to say, especially about advanced topics. In Chap. 7, we examine multimedia systems, which have a number of properties and requirements that differ from conventional operating systems. Among other items, scheduling and the file system are affected by the nature of multimedia. Another advanced topic is multiple processor systems, including multiprocessors, parallel computers, and distributed systems. These subjects are covered in Chap. 8.

A hugely important subject is operating system security, which is covered in Chap 9. Among the topics discussed in this chapter are threats (e.g., viruses and worms), protection mechanisms, and security models.

Next we have some case studies of real operating systems. These are UNIX (Chap. 10) and Windows 2000 (Chap. 11). The book concludes with some thoughts about operating system design in Chap. 12