Memory Management and File Systems

reading · we frame, you read MIT or the canonical taught · we author, no canonical fits ↺ spirals back to earlier lessons

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Prerequisites

Memory Systems and I/O not yet

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Complete prerequisites first to enroll.

reading · 30 min + ~231 min canonical

Memory Allocation and the Allocator: What malloc Actually Does

When you called malloc(64) in the C course — or every time Ruby created an object, or Python grew a list — something had to find 64 free bytes in the heap, mark them used, and han…

primary OSTEP — Virtualization and Persistence sections

preview →

reading · 30 min + ~231 min canonical L1

Swapping, Copy-on-Write, and Memory-Mapped Files

The virtual-memory course gave you the mechanism — page tables mapping virtual to physical. This lesson is where that mechanism does its most clever tricks. Three of them, each a …

primary OSTEP — Virtualization and Persistence sections

after L1 locked

reading · 30 min + ~231 min canonical L1

File Systems: Inodes, Directories, and Free-Space Management

Every file you've ever saved is a lie told well. A file looks like a contiguous stream of bytes with a name and a folder — but underneath, its data is scattered across the disk in…

primary OSTEP — Virtualization and Persistence sections

after L2 locked

reading · 30 min + ~231 min canonical L1

Journaling, Crash Recovery, and Disk Scheduling

Pull the power cord out of a running computer. When it boots back up, why isn't the file system a corrupted mess? You were, after all, potentially halfway through writing a file —…

primary OSTEP — Virtualization and Persistence sections

after L3 locked

reading · 35 min + ~231 min canonical L1

Virtualization and the Ruby Garbage Collector: Hypervisors, Containers, and GC

This lesson closes the Operating Systems block with two ideas that sit at opposite ends of the abstraction ladder but share a common root — and then makes them concrete in the lan…

primary OSTEP — Virtualization and Persistence sections

after L4 locked

exercise reading · 15 min L1

Exercises: Easy (Warm-up)

- [ ] OSTEP Ch13: Address Spaces — Draw memory layout of a C program: text, data, heap, stack - [ ] OSTEP Ch14: Memory API — Write programs demonstrating malloc/free errors, check…

after L5 locked

exercise reading · 30 min L1

Exercises: Medium (Core)

- [ ] OSTEP Ch18: Paging Introduction — Simulate address translation with page table - [ ] OSTEP Ch19: TLBs — Measure TLB size by timing array accesses at different strides - [ ] …

after L6 locked

exercise reading · 45 min L1

Exercises: Hard (Stretch)

- [ ] xv6 Lab: Page tables — Add a page that maps kernel info into user space - [ ] xv6 Lab: Copy-on-write fork — Implement COW fork in xv6 - [ ] Implement a log-structured file s…

after L7 locked

exercise reading · 60 min L1

Mini-Project

- [ ] Build a FUSE file system in C — Mount a virtual file system that stores data in a single flat file; implement open, read, write, readdir, getattr; test with standard UNIX to…

after L8 locked

L10

project reading · 480 min L1

Project: Memory Allocator in C

Implement mymalloc and myfree using a free list with first-fit allocation. Track allocations, detect double-frees, and report memory leaks at program exit. A simplified version of…

after L9 locked

L11

project reading · 360 min L1

Project: Simple File System in C

Implement an in-memory file system with inodes, directory entries, and data blocks. Support create, read, write, delete, ls, and cat. Data lives in a flat binary file that persist…

after L10 locked

L12

project reading · 240 min L1

Project: Ruby GC Analyzer

Write a Ruby script that uses ObjectSpace and GC.stat to monitor garbage collection behavior. Allocate objects in various patterns (rapid allocation, long-lived objects, circular …

after L11 locked

L13

assessment reading · 63 min L1

Self-Assessment: Memory Management and File Systems

- [ ] Explain paging. How does a virtual address get translated to a physical address? - [ ] What is copy-on-write? How does fork() use it? - [ ] What is thrashing? What causes it…

after L12 locked

L14

assessment reading · 60 min L1

Quarter 6 Gate Check: Operating Systems

- [ ] Course 6.1 knowledge check passed - [ ] Course 6.2 knowledge check passed - [ ] Unix Shell capstone completed

after L13 locked

14 lessons. Read in order; spiral back when you need to. By the end you'll have used the core ideas twice — once on the abstract, once on something you'll meet at work next week.