Professor Roger Kraft
Office: Classroom Office Building, Room 368
Office phone: (219) 989-2696
Office hours: 2:00--4:00 TR, and by appointment.
E-mail: rlkraft@pnw.edu
This course is an introduction to computer operating systems. We want to learn what operating systems are, why we need them, how to work with them, how to program them, how they are designed, and how they are implemented. We will cover the general theory of modern operating systems and we will study two examples of currently popular operating systems, Linux and Microsoft Windows. We will also write "systems level" programs that interface with the Windows operating system.
In addition to the study of operating systems, two other subjects will be important in this course, the C programming language and the Intel 386 architecture and assembly language. All of the programming assignments will be done in C; we will cover what is needed about C in class and with handouts. And to really understand how operating systems, and C programs running on them, are implemented we need to understand how CPU architectures support operating systems and C runtimes systems. We will use the specific example of the Intel 386 architecture and see how it supports the Windows operating system and C programs.