INTRODUCTION TO

OPERATING SYSTEMS
AGENDA
• Introduce myself
• Operating system questions for interviews
• Introduction to operating system with example
• Kernel vs Operating System
• Examples of operating system and kernel
• Introduction to system calls
• Introduction to interrupts
Before proceeding further…

• Do not forget to subscribe to the channel.

• Share this with your friends(Saturday 5PM class IST)
• Telegram link: https://t.me/joinchat/OcDlRxsp56Z1yiqQJu9unw
• Email doesn’t scale - https://bit.ly/2LVLWWy
• Planning to take practical classes related to operating system(linux)
• Have doubts? Ask in comments or while I am live
• Will try explaining your doubts in next classes
Full classes schedule

• Introduction to operating system and what all topics to focus for interviews
• Process management (process vs program, process control block, process states, process
lifecycle - fork(), exec(), wait(), exit(), zombie and orphan process)
• Interprocess communication (Multiprocessing, multithreading and challenges)
• Process Scheduling Algorithms
• Process synchronization(mutex, semaphore and deadlock)
• Memory management part 1(Virtual memory, physical vs logical address space)
• Memory management part2(Demand paging, page replacement algorithms)
• Miscellaneous(filesystem and other topics which were left)
ABOUT ME

• Site Reliability Engineer at LinkedIn(1.5 years)

• Former DevOps Engineer at Directi(1.5 years)
• Alumni of IIIT Allahabad
• Hobbies: Books(Finance + SRE), Cricket, Making youtube Videos
OPERATING SYSTEM QUESTIONS
ASKED IN INTERVIEWS
SUBJECTIVE + MCQ

• MCQ Online test

• Subjective questions (F2F or telephonic interview)
• Mostly asked to candidates with no or less experience
• Software engineer + DevOps/SRE + Service based companies
Advantage of learning OS

• Knowledge
• Practical: Threads + mutex/semaphore + memory segments (Software)
• Practical: Zombie process + Nice values + Linux Commands
• Will discuss practical knowledge in my next series
• Edge overs others in interviews
• Directi Experience
What questions are asked?

• https://practice.geeksforgeeks.org/tag-
page.php?tag=Operating%20Systems
• Will list down what questions can be answered by seeing my video
• Not easy to cover all the questions
• Will cover only important ones
• https://shivammitra.com/operating%20system/how-to-study-operating-
systems/
• Why not watch my other videos on operating system?
QUESTIONS WHICH YOU WILL BE ABLE TO
ANSWER AFTER THIS VIDEO?
• What is operating system?
• Explain the architecture of operating system.
• Difference between operating system and kernel
• What are the functions of operating system
• Give some examples of popular operating system and kernel
• What are system call with examples
• What are interrupts with examples
What is an operating system?

• System program that manages the system’s hardware

• Acts as an interface between the user and the hardware
• Includes all the programs that are associated with the operation of the
system
• What all are parts of an operating system?
Parts of an operating system

• No universal definition for what should be included.

• Include parts that are essential for the running of the system
• Parts of OS
• Kernel
• Device drivers
• User Interface
• System Libraries
• System utilities – disk formatters, network utilities, data recovery etc
• Are application programs(chrome, excel) part of the operating system? (Microsoft vs
United States)
Architecture diagram of operating system
• The operating system(kernel) is helping in running the process.
• But if the process wants to talk to hardware, use system calls.
• Reading/writing to file
• Creating a new process/thread
• Allocate/deallocate memory
• Detailed Explanation - https://youtu.be/6FqUzzVwm4E
What is a kernel?

• Kernel is the heart of the operating system

• Portion of the OS code that is always resident in main memory
• Functions of the kernel
• Process management
• Memory management
• File system management
• Protection and security
• Device management
• Inter process communication
• Operating system may become a kernel in some cases(embedded devices)
Functions of the operating system

• Kernel is a part of OS
• Kernel functions +
• Provide CLI/GUI for interaction with system
• Provide system utilities
• Provides system libraries
• Detailed explanation: https://youtu.be/IEL2smumOks
Examples of operating system and kernel

• Windows -> Windows NT -> 76% market share

• Mac OS -> XNU -> 19% market share
• Ubuntu, Redhat -> Linux -> 1.6%
• The above market share is for desktops
• In servers, Linux has 70% market share.
• Cars, watches, smart tv, smart phones(android), NASA?
• What do they have in common?
System Calls

• User applications use system calls to talk to the hardware.

• Operating system acts as an interface between users and hardware.
• Interface -> System call interface
• System calls are functions that are present in the C library(glibc)
• Related videos:
• Introduction to system calls
• How system call works
Category of System Calls

• Process management – fork(), exec(), wait(), exit()

• Memory management – brk(), sbrk(), mmap()
• File system management – write(), read(), open(), close()
• Inter process communication – pipe(), socket(), connect(), send(), recv()
• These are for Linux operating system.
• Windows - https://www.tutorialspoint.com/different-types-of-system-calls
What are interrupts

• OS manages the hardware

• OS needs to communicate with hardware devices
• Should the OS wait for the communication from hardware devices?
• Press of keys on keyboards or writing to a file.
• Polling – kernel keeps on checking any updates from devices at regular
time intervals. Drawback?
• Related videos:
• Introduction to interrupts
• How interrupt works
Interrupts (Continued)

• An interrupt is an input signal to the processor indicating an event requires

immediate attention.
• The current process running on the processor gets interrupted.
• Interrupt handler code is then run.
• Types of interrupts
• Hardware interrupts
• Software interrupts
Hardware interrupts

• Issued by hardware device – keyboard, mouse, disks etc

• Can arrive at any time -> asynchronous interrupts
Hardware interrupts working
Software interrupts

• Issued by the processor itself

• Caused by program that is running on the processor -> synchronous
interrupts
• System calls are also called using interrupts(traps)
• https://youtu.be/UFBe1HdN8h0
• Segmentation fault, page fault, divide by zero etc
Software interrupts working
Next class (Process management)

• How kernel runs your program?

• Program vs process
• Process control block
• Process states
• Process lifecycle(fork(), exec(), wait(), exit())
• Zombie and orphan process