Fundamentals of Operating Systems

A systems-focused study of operating systems covering processes, memory, CPU execution, concurrency, storage, filesystems, sockets, asynchronous I/O, kernel/user mode, virtualization, and containerization.

• Understand how operating systems enable applications to interact with CPU, memory, storage, and networking.
• Understand the difference between a program and a process and how a process is represented in memory.
• Understand process memory regions including the stack, data section, and heap.
• Understand virtual memory, DMA, and how applications read from and write to memory.
• Understand CPU components, instruction lifecycle, pipelining, and parallelism.
• Understand processes vs threads, concurrency, context switching, and when threads are used.
• Understand persistent storage, filesystems, and what happens during file I/O.
• Understand sockets, connections, kernel queues, socket programming patterns, and asynchronous I/O.
• Understand the boundary between user mode and kernel mode.
• Understand virtualization and containerization concepts including cgroups and namespaces.
• Understand how compilers and linkers fit into the path from source code to executable programs.
• Connect OS internals to practical software-engineering performance problems rather than treating the operating system as a black box.

The course helped me connect application-level behavior with what happens underneath it — from processes, memory and system calls to CPU execution, storage, networking, kernel queues, and virtualization. The main engineering takeaway is learning to reason across these layers when investigating performance, I/O, concurrency, and backend-system behavior.