Operating Systems by Striver

An operating system (OS) manages the resources that programs need to run, including CPU time, memory, files, and devices. This playlist starts with familiar questions, such as what happens when you open an app and how several apps run together, then builds the understanding needed to explain system behaviour.

The syllabus covers 14 modules and 156 learning items, progressing from processes and CPU scheduling to concurrency, memory management, storage, security, and virtualization. It brings together core concepts, algorithms, numerical topics, and practical connections to modern software systems.

What You Will Learn

Begin with the role of an operating system, kernel structures, processes, threads, and CPU scheduling. Learn how programs request OS services through system calls, how processes communicate, and how synchronization mechanisms coordinate access to shared resources.

Explore race conditions, locks, semaphores, deadlocks, and classic concurrency problems. Continue with memory allocation, paging, page tables, the TLB, virtual memory, and page replacement to understand how an OS manages and protects memory.

You will also cover file systems, disk scheduling, device drivers, interrupts, and input/output. Later topics connect these foundations to security, virtual machines, containers, performance debugging, and the behaviour of backend systems and databases.

Understand What Happens When a Program Runs

Follow the connections between loading a program, creating a process, allocating memory, scheduling execution, and accessing a file. Learn why a process may wait even when it has work to do, how a page fault is handled, and how shared data can lead to a race condition.

As you progress, examine the trade-offs behind scheduling, synchronization, and memory management. Understanding these connections helps you explain program behaviour and reason through follow-up questions during a technical interview.

Trace, Compare, and Apply

Use the algorithms and numerical topics to work through system behaviour step by step, then connect the results to practical situations.

• Trace CPU scheduling algorithms and compare waiting, turnaround, and response times.
• Work through paging, page-table, and TLB access-time calculations.
• Compare page replacement algorithms and examine page faults and thrashing.
• Use resource allocation graphs and Banker's Algorithm to reason about deadlocks and safe states.
• Examine synchronization problems and distinguish deadlock, starvation, and livelock.
• Use the interview and exam checklist to guide revision across the syllabus.

Who Is This Playlist For?

This playlist is suitable for students learning operating systems, learners preparing for university exams and campus placements, and developers strengthening their computer science fundamentals for software engineering interviews. No previous OS knowledge is required. Basic programming knowledge will help, while familiarity with C, pointers, and memory will make the system-call and memory-management topics easier to follow.

Prepare for Operating Systems Interviews and Exams

By the end, you should be able to explain how an operating system manages processes, memory, files, and devices, and solve core scheduling and memory-management problems. For OS interview preparation, practise tracing program behaviour, explaining concurrency issues, and comparing approaches to resource management. Use the interview and exam checklist to revise operating systems interview questions and numerical topics for campus placements, technical interviews, and university exams.