tl;dr

• OMSCS Graduate Introduction to Operating Systems will give you a wide breadth into modern operating systems
• Exams are over-weighted
• Projects were fun, but can be challenging coming from a less experienced background

GIOS Fall 2021 Review

Coming from an economics background with Java and Python experience, GIOS was a plunge into the deep end of the swimming pool. There are two parts to the course:

1. Lectures (pretty good, but old, amended, and in some places confusing)
2. Projects

The projects are always tangent on the lectures, but you CANNOT solely rely on lecture material to complete them. They are challenging for someone with not much C/C++ experience, but they were also rewarding and enjoyable.

If you decide to take this class, you are in for a challenge—but you will not be at it alone. This class has one of the best online communities in the program, thanks to strong TA’s and participation on slack.

Takeaways

I can code in C. I can confidently describe what an operating system is responsible for and generally go into specifics. I got a taste for distributed computing and how that works. I understand threading, inter and intra process communication using sockets, shared memory, signals, etc. I feel more confident in taking on the rest of the systems specialization.

Where it could have been better

• Lectures are excellent (info is presented concisely for the amount of material) but can be better in some spots.
• Exams are weighted heavily.
• Exams are short. Each question is worth roughly the same as a project’s readme for your overall grade.
• Papers are good but don’t play a huge part in exams. You ought to read them, but there is little incentive grade-wise.