OS & Computer Architecture

How a program becomes a process, system calls, the CPU's fetch-decode-execute cycle, ISAs, caches and pipelines — every example run for real on Linux.

Lessons

• The Memory Hierarchy and Caches
• Virtual Memory and Paging
• Page Replacement
• Memory Allocation: malloc, Fragmentation and Allocators
• File Systems
• I/O Systems and Storage
• From Source Code to Silicon: The Layers of a Computer
• Data Representation: Binary, Two's Complement, Floating Point and Endianness
• Digital Logic: Gates, Adders, Multiplexers and Flip-Flops
• CPU Organization: ALU, Registers, Control Unit and Buses
• Instruction Set Architectures: CISC, RISC, x86-64, ARM and RISC-V
• The Fetch–Decode–Execute Cycle
• Assembly Language and Calling Conventions
• Pipelining and Hazards
• Branch Prediction, Superscalar and Out-of-Order Execution
• Multicore, Cache Coherence and Memory Ordering
• Virtualization and Containers
• Booting, Protection and Platform Security
• Performance Analysis
• Capstone: Tracing a System Call from Your Code Down to Silicon
• OS and Computer Architecture Interview Questions
• Practice Exercises
• OS and Computer Architecture Cheat Sheet
• Final Quiz
• Learning Roadmap
• What to Learn Next & Final Checklist
• What an Operating System Does: Kernel, User Mode and OS Structures
• From Program to Process: Compiling, Linking, ELF and Loading
• Processes: Address Spaces, the PCB, States, fork, exec and wait
• System Calls: Crossing into the Kernel
• Interrupts, Exceptions and Signals
• Threads
• CPU Scheduling
• Synchronization: Races, Mutexes, Semaphores and Condition Variables
• Deadlock
• Inter-Process Communication
• Course Overview & Running Example