CST334 Week 8

    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.

    Concurrency and threading showed me how modern systems work by handling multiple things at once and how important careful synchronization is to prevent unpredictable results. The sections on I/O devices also gave me a better understanding of the physical side of computing, how data moves between components, how hardware limitations affect performance, and how the OS keeps track of everything from individual bytes to entire directories.

    In the end my biggest takeaway is that the operating system is far more than just a background program, it is the conductor of the entire computer, working to make sure that hardware and software work in together.