- Investigative assignment (circa 1500 words) with PowerPoint presentation (weighted at 50% of module total meeting learning outcomes 1, 2 and 3)
- Portfolio of tasks (weighted at 50% of module total meeting learning outcomes 2, 3 and 4),

Content will focus on:
Examination of the purpose of an operating system, the operating system as program environment, the relevance and usefulness of a virtual machine.
Operating system structure, layered systems, monolithic systems, relevance to distributed systems and mobile devices.

Minimum hardware requirements, System functions, constraints and characteristics.

The importance of concurrency, synchronisation and communication.
Basic kernel components, interrupt handling, low level scheduling, communication.
Memory management and protection, Input and output, request queues, synchronous and asynchronous I/O. Device drivers, ancillary device driver processes (rationale and implementation), buffering. Spooling,

Data storage, internal, external and cloud.
Performance, reliability and security considerations. Remote file systems. System backup and recovery. Active directory features and roles, including clustering, dns, dchp, remote access, virtualisation, Ubuntu features and roles.

12 hours of lectures supporting at least 18 hours of supervised labs. Students will be expected to undertake additional independent lab-based learning in order to complete the portfolio of tasks. There will also be independent study.

Access to various operating systems both during and outside of supervised sessions. This could be in a work place, lab or in the home.

Only available to students on HNC/HND and Foundation Degrees.

Abraham Silberschatz & Peter B Galvin. (2007), Operating System Concepts. Seventh edition, John Wiley. ISBN 978-0-471-69466-3
Andrew Tanenbaum. (2008) Modern Operating Systems... ISBN 978-0-138-13459-4
William Stallings (2008) Operating Systems, Internals & Design Principles.. Pearson ISBN 978-0-136-03337-0