Operating Systems / Linux

What an operating system manages: processes, memory, devices, files, protection, and the boundary between applications and hardware.

Linux kernel responsibilities, processes, memory, filesystems, networking, devices, and user space.

Thread execution, shared process resources, scheduling, stacks, TLS, and synchronization.

Process address spaces, credentials, file descriptors, parent/child lifecycle, signals, and scheduling.

Process/thread lifecycle, scheduling, context switching, states, resources, synchronization, and IPC.

Core IPC mechanisms: shared memory, pipes, FIFOs, message queues, signals, semaphores, and sockets, with their trade-offs.

Critical sections, mutual exclusion, ordering, semaphores, mutexes, condition variables, and classic synchronization problems.

Deadlock conditions, prevention, avoidance, detection, recovery, and practical lock-ordering strategies.

The relationship between programs, processes, threads, and user-space tasks, including address spaces, scheduling, isolation, and context-switch costs.

Virtual address spaces, page tables, anonymous/file-backed memory, page cache, reclaim, swap, and OOM.