CST334 Module 7

What did I learn in the seventh week of CST334? 

This week I learned about another five different topics about operating systems. The first topic was about I/O devices, which introduced how an operating system managed the input/output of devices. Basically, the topic went over how each device interacted between hardware and software, while explaining how the operating system communicated with other devices. The second topic was about hard drives, which detailed the physical structure and performance of hard drives. Basically, the topic covered key concepts pertaining to seek time, rotational latency, and transfer time, while also introducing disk scheduling algorithms to optimize access patterns. The third topic was about files and directories, which explored how operating systems organized and managed data. Basically, through files and directories the operating system is able to define metadata and hierarchical structures, while enforcing access control to maintain consistency throughout the system.

The fourth topic was about file systems pertaining to data, which focused on the internal data structures that support file systems. Therefore, going over key concepts like index nodes, superblock, and allocation strategies. Basically, index nodes represent each file, while storing metadata that details the file size, ownership, and permissions. Superblocks are a vital structure that contains global information about a file, which details the size, block size, and location of the index node. The allocation strategies detail bitmaps and free lists, which are used to track free space based a compact representation or a linked list of free blocks. The final topic was about file systems pertaining to access, which focused on how operating systems managed access to file systems. Therefore, going over key concepts like caching and concurrency control. Basically, caching within an operating system, frequently accesses blocks in memory to reduce disk I/O. Finally, concurrency control has multiple processes that can access the same file concurrently depending on locks.