Topics List for Qualifying Examination: Operating Systems

Uniprocessor Topics

1. OS Structure: Monolithic, modular, microkernel
2. Virtual Memory: Protection, Sharing, Translations, Page Replacement Strategies
3. Process Management: Scheduling, context switches
4. Concurrency: mutual exclusion, deadlock, critical sections, race conditions, semaphores, monitors, locks, barriers other mutual exclusion primitives.
5. Classical OS-related algorithms: Dekker's Algorithm, Peterson's Algorithm, etc.
6. Classical OS-related problems: dining philosophers, bounded-buffer, etc.
7. Disks and File Systems

Multiprocessor Topics

1. Distributed operating systems
2. Distributed file systems
3. Standard encryption and authentication systems: DES, RSA, Kerberos
4. Message-passing: sockets, RPC, MPI, CORBA, DBus
5. Process Migration
6. Software distributed shared memory and memory consistency models
7. Time and Clocks
8. Data Integrity (especially cyclic redundancy checks)