One More Byte CS Devlog

     Over the past eight weeks I’ve developed a greater appreciation for how an operating system serves as the bridge between hardware and software. Before this class, I understood the OS as the thing that “runs the computer,” but now I see the complexity of what that really means. The OS isn’t just managing programs, it’s organizing processes, controlling access to memory, scheduling CPU time, and ensuring the different parts of the system work together without interfering with one another.      One of the most engaging and challenging parts of the course was working with memory virtualization. Practicing how virtual addresses are translated to physical ones deepened my understanding of how the OS protects processes, manages limited space efficiently, and keeps programs running smoothly even when they are competing for resources. It was interesting to see how theoretical concepts like paging, base and bounds, and caching algorithms play out in practice. ...

      This week I explored how computers handle input/output and manage storage at both the hardware and software levels. I started by learning about I/O devices and the role of the bus, which acts as the main pathway for transferring bytes between the CPU, memory, and peripherals. I learned about three primary ways the CPU interacts with I/O are polling, where the CPU repeatedly checks if a device is ready; interrupt driven, where the device signals the CPU when it’s ready, and direct memory access, where data is transferred directly between the device and memory without continuous CPU involvement.      Next I learned more about how physical hard drives work. They store data on spinning metal disks called platters, which are read and written to by specialized heads. I learned how to calculate a drives average rotational delay which is the time it takes for the correct sector to rotate under the read/write head and how that, along with seek time ...

       This week we continued concurrent programming and synchronization concepts and built on the ideas from last week. One of the first things I learned about was binder buffer coding, which was about how data can be shared and communicated between different parts of a system or between different threads. It's a used when dealing with message passing or structured data flow. Systems with modular or layered designs can make use of this to communicate with other parts of the system.    After  that, I learned about the concept of semaphores. Semaphores are a core component in concurrent programming as they act as signaling mechanisms used to control access to shared resources. The main idea of semaphores are integer variables protected by atomic operations like wait() and signal(). A semaphore can be used to limit the number of threads that access a resource such as a database connection pool or a bounded buffer to ensure that the variables remain safe ...