A complete series to understand the internal working of Operating Systems. This roadmap is designed for students, developers, and enthusiasts to learn OS concepts with structure and clarity.
What is an Operating System? How does it act as an interface between software and hardware? Learn the key responsibilities of an OS.
Difference between a program, a process, and a thread. Understand how concurrent execution happens in systems.
Explore different types of operating systems like Batch, Time-Sharing, Distributed, Real-Time, and Embedded systems.
Understand how early operating systems worked without user interaction using job batching.
Learn how modern OS handles multiple programs and user tasks simultaneously.
Understand CPU privilege levels, protection rings, and how an OS separates critical and user-level operations.
Explore the process lifecycle: New, Ready, Running, Waiting, and Terminated states.
Learn the key difference between regular function calls and system-level calls used to communicate with the OS.
Understand Preemptive vs Non-Preemptive scheduling and why CPU scheduling is essential.
Dive into individual scheduling algorithms: their working, advantages, and practical applications.
Explore how processes get ignored (starvation) and how aging is used to resolve it.
Classic synchronization problem demonstrating bounded buffer management using threads.
Learn about safe access to shared resources using mutual exclusion principles.
Study tools like mutexes, monitors, and spinlocks to coordinate concurrent processes.
Understand binary and counting semaphores with examples and use-cases.
What causes deadlock? Learn prevention, avoidance, detection, and recovery techniques.
Deadlock avoidance algorithm used to allocate resources safely without entering unsafe states.
Learn how memory is allocated using First Fit, Best Fit, and Worst Fit strategies.
Concept of extending memory by using disk space, enabling multitasking beyond RAM limits.
Understand different memory allocation strategies and their role in address translation.
Learn how addresses and functions are bound at runtime instead of compile-time.
What happens when the OS cannot find a memory page in RAM? Understand how faults are handled.
Study FIFO, LRU, and Optimal algorithms used to manage page faults.
Counter-intuitive behavior where more memory leads to more page faults in FIFO.
Condition where a system spends more time swapping than executing due to overcommitment.
Introduction to how disk access is scheduled to optimize read/write efficiency.
Study SSTF, SCAN, LOOK, C-SCAN, and other I/O access strategies.
Understand how cache improves memory access speed and why it's essential.
Explore memory mapping techniques for efficient cache use.
Learn how OS stores, organizes, and provides access to files and directories.
Study common file systems like FAT32, NTFS, ext4, and more.
Understand techniques like contiguous, linked, and indexed allocation.
What is fragmentation? Learn about internal, external fragmentation, and defragmentation tools.
Explore how blocking I/O waits for completion vs non-blocking allowing multitasking.
Difference between sync and async operations in system I/O handling.
Learn how I/O jobs are queued (e.g., print spooling) to avoid device conflicts.
Understand RAID levels (0–6, 10), redundancy, and performance benefits in data storage.
Study malware, access control, privilege escalation, and OS-level security features.
Understand how the OS loads from power-on to login.
Used in embedded, industrial, and robotic systems where timing is critical.
Explore command-line interfaces and automate tasks using shell scripts.
Understand core architectural ideas behind building an OS, modularity, and performance.
💡 Start from the top, go step-by-step, and don’t forget to code, visualize, and revise along the way!