This open education resource is a collection of collection of Concepts of Operating Systems in Question & Answer form that are useful as out-of-class activity while flipping the classroom.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"For about 40 minutes in 2013, the world was in panic. Cloud services for internet retail giant Amazon had crashed. In less than an hour, Amazon had lost an estimated 5 million dollars in sales. It’s an operational standstill feared by cloud users and operators alike. Unfortunately, most methods for detecting the faults that lead to such crashes tend to be inefficient and inaccurate. But now, a team of researchers from China, Saudi Arabia, and the US has developed one of the best detection methods yet—based on a machine learning tool known as a support vector machine. A support vector machine is a classification-based learning algorithm. For the simple task of classifying circles by color, the algorithm takes a set of examples and determines the dividing line or plane that maximizes the separation between the two classes. That provides the widest margin of classification error, preventing any new circles from being mislabeled..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

The course presents an overview of the history and structure of modern operating systems, analyzing in detail each of the major components of an operating system, and exploring more advanced topics in the field, such as security concerns. Upon successful completion of this course, the student will be able to: explain what an operating system does and how it is used; identify the various components of a computer system and how they interact with an operating system; describe the differences between a 32-bit and 64-bit operating system; explain the different types of operating systems and the major ones in use today; discuss the importance and use of threads and processes in an operating system; describe concurrency; explain the difference between a thread and a process; discuss context switching and how it is used in an operating system; describe synchronization; explain a race condition; discuss interprocess communication; describe how semaphores can be used in an operating system; discuss three of the classic synchronization problems; explain the alternatives to semaphores; discuss CPU scheduling and its relevance to operating systems; explain the general goals of CPU scheduling; describe the differences between pre-emptive and non-preemptive scheduling; discuss four CPU scheduling algorithms; explain what deadlock is in relation to operating systems; discuss deadlock prevention, avoidance, and their differences; describe deadlock detection and recovery; explain the memory hierarchy; discuss how the operating system interacts with memory; describe how virtual memory works; discuss three algorithms for dynamic memory allocation; explain methods of memory access; describe paging and page replacement algorithms; describe a file system and its purpose; discuss various file allocation methods; explain disk allocation and associated algorithms; discuss types of security threats; describe the various types of malware; explain basic security techniques; explain basic networking principles; discuss protocols and how they are used; explain reference models, particularly TCP/IP and OSI. (Computer Science 401)