CSUMB CS Online Learning Journal Blog
Persistence is a good word to use for the course. It was definitely the most challenging of the courses in my time so far in CS Online. I learned a great deal about communicating and leaning on my team mates for support during many of these weeks. The class was a lot of fun and … Read more
This week, we covered Concurrency. Specifically, we discussed I/O (input/output), hard disk drives, RAID arrays of hard drives, and files & file systems. We learned methods in which the computer/operating systems handle I/O operations. We also covered the mechanics of hard drives, and the way they interact with the computer. We compared various types of … Read more
This week, we covered semaphores and common concurrency bugs. Semaphores are a type of primitive which work as both locks and condition variables. They were created by Edsgar Djikstra as a solution to many issues related to concurrency. Some concurrency issues we looked at were order violation bugs, atomicity bugs, and deadlock-related bugs.
This week in Operating Systems, we were introduced to Concurrency. This topic revolves around the usage of threads within a single process. A multi-threading (the use of multiple threads) is distinct from multiprogramming (the use of multiple processes) in that threads all live inside the same process; they can share all data. This offers advantages … Read more
This week, much of my energy was focused on the Lab assignment. In this lab, we were attempting to simulate a particular means of memory paging using a “hardware” cache (which was represented by an array in C) and a software queue. This assignment did an excellent job of illustrating the importance of both the … Read more
This week in CST 334, we learned about memory virtualization. We looked over various techniques on how memory could be virtualized. The simplest of these is base and bounds. This technique is not preferable because it can cause a lot of wasted space. Another of these is segmentation, which divides the memory into its logical … Read more
This week’s module covered two main topics: forking processes in a Unix environment, and how an operating system schedules CPU time for processes. This week’s lab was a good hands on learning experience with forking; specifically, we used the fork/sleep/exec system calls in Linux. We also went over many methods of CPU scheduling, including First … Read more
Week in Review This first week of Introduction to Operating Systems had a lot of information to unpack. For the lab portion of this module, I wrote my very first Bash script. It was interesting to see the differences in a scripting language like this and a full fledged programming language. Some of the weaknesses … Read more