Operating System Engineering
MIT's introduction to operating systems design, built around a close reading of UNIX source code and classic systems research papers. Lectures cover virtual memory, threads, context switches, kernels, interrupts, system calls, interprocess communication, coordination, and the boundary between hardware and software. Individual lab assignments have students implement a small operating system in C with some x86 assembly, working through problems like process scheduling and memory management from the ground up. Materials include lecture notes, reading lists of research papers, and problem sets published through MIT OpenCourseWare, free to access with no certificate offered. The course assumes prior programming experience and is pitched at students who already know their way around C and basic computer architecture, aiming to make the internals of a working kernel concrete rather than theoretical.