What happens beneath your program, taught at the Linux terminal so the theory stays concrete. Doubles as the foundation for cloud and cybersecurity work.
What you will be able to do
At a glance
Full syllabus
8 modules · 40 topics · 162 concepts
The role of an OS
Kernel and user space
Kernel designs
Booting
System calls
You can describe the role of the kernel and what a system call actually does.
Setting up
The filesystem
Essential commands
Text editing
Permissions
You can work confidently at a Linux shell without a graphical environment.
Process fundamentals
Creating processes
Inspecting processes
Signals
Jobs and background work
You can inspect, control and reason about the processes on a running system.
Scheduling basics
Criteria
Algorithms
Advanced scheduling
Working the problems
You can compare scheduling algorithms and compute the standard exam metrics.
Threads
The critical section problem
Primitives
Classic problems
Deadlock
You can identify a race condition and choose the right synchronisation primitive.
Address spaces
Contiguous allocation
Paging
Segmentation
Virtual memory
You can explain virtual memory translation and diagnose a thrashing system.
Disks
Filesystem structure
Linux filesystems
Managing storage
RAID and reliability
You can explain inodes and journalling, and manage disks on a Linux box.
Services
Networking
Package management
Shell scripting
Diagnosing a sick machine
You can administer a server: services, networking, logs and automation.
5 builds you keep
Implement FCFS, SJF, round robin and priority scheduling over the same workload, output the Gantt chart and the metrics, and show where each algorithm starves someone.
Feed a reference string through FIFO, LRU and optimal, count the faults, and demonstrate Belady's anomaly happening rather than being asserted.
Write the naive version, watch it lock up, then fix it three different ways and argue for one. Far more convincing than the textbook diagram.
From a blank VM: users and sudo, SSH keys only, a firewall, a service under systemd, log rotation, and a cron job that reports disk usage.
You are handed a VM with a deliberately planted problem and no hints. Work through CPU, memory, disk and network systematically, find it, and write up the diagnosis.
Hands on with
Before you enrol
It is both, on purpose. Scheduling, synchronisation, deadlock, memory management and filesystems are the Mumbai University and MSBTE OS paper. Every one of them is demonstrated at a Linux terminal, which is what makes the theory stick and what employers want.
Basic C helps for the process and threading modules, and we keep the code small. The administration and scripting parts need no prior programming at all.
No. Everything runs in a VirtualBox virtual machine with snapshots, so breaking the system is part of the course and recovering takes one click. Your actual operating system is never touched.
Because both are Linux underneath. Containers are a kernel feature, every cloud instance is a Linux box, and most security work is understanding processes, permissions and networking. Students who skip this stall later.
You can memorise commands, and you will be stuck the moment something behaves unexpectedly. Knowing what a page fault or a zombie process is, is the difference between fixing a problem and rebooting and hoping.
Where this leads
One skill on a CV is a hobby. These are the courses students take alongside this one, in the order that builds an actual role.
Editing is now half craft and half tooling. Learn the craft properly, then use AI to remove the tedious parts: transcription, captions, rough cuts and cleanup.
The complete analyst toolkit in one programme: spreadsheets, SQL, visualisation and Python, applied to real datasets and finished with a dashboard you can defend in an interview.
The highest return per hour of any course we run. Four weeks of practical AI for people who work in documents, spreadsheets and email all day, with no coding at all.