This class is a gently introduction into operating systems concepts at EPFL for undergraduate students in their third year. The students come with a light background in C programming from a mandatory class on C concepts and an optional C programming project in their second year. Generally, the C background of the students is rather light and many have not really worked with Linux environments yet.
The class follows the excellent Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces by Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau and Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau. We break the class into four components:
- Virtualization
- Concurrency
- Persistence
- Security
While recent editions of the book have added classic systems security with a heavy focus on authentication, access control, and cryptography, we focus on software security concepts. The software security component enables students to reason about bugs, understand vulnerabilities, and gives them tools on how to handle security issues. We feel that this prepares them better for software development and security aspects finally connect different pieces from the earlier pillars in a different light.
The slides are written in Markdown and can be translated to PDF through pandoc.
We leverage inline TikZ figures in LaTeX environments for visual figures.
If you have the necessary packages installed, you can create the slides through a hearty
$ make
If your LaTeX and pandoc environments are not on par, you may have to install the following:
$ sudo apt install pandoc graphviz dot2tex texlive-full
Note that texlive-full is overkill but storage is almost free nowadays.
- 2021: Updated slides and handout material (Mathias Payer and Sanidhya Kashyap)
- 2020: Heavily reworked slides in the 2nd year (Mathias Payer)
- 2019: First version of the slides, created from scratch (Mathias Payer)
Feel free to reuse these slides but credit Mathias Payer when reusing the material. If you have suggestions on improvements, please let me know before you fire off a huge pull request. Notes on small improvements and typos are always welcome!