Week 1: Introduction, Boot process, Mechanisms & Policies

Lecture notes:
Background
Booting
Concepts
System calls
Supplemental notes:
Minimal Intel Architecture Boot Loader, Bare Bones Functionality Required for Booting an Intel Architecture Platform. White Paper, Intel Corporation, January 2010.
System Startup Programming Topics: The Boot Process, Mac OS X Reference Library, (c) 2008 Apple Inc.
Buzzwords:

Batch systems, multiprogramming, time sharing, preemption, BIOS, thin clients, operating system, cache, virtual machine.

Boot loader, multi-stage/chain boot loader, Master Boot Record (MBR), disk partitions, Volume Boot Record (VBR), GRUB, Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI), EFI Byte Code (EBC), GUID Partition Table (GPT).

Mechanism vs. Policy.

Operating system, kernel, microkernel, kernel mode, privileged mode, supervisor mode, interrupts, traps, exceptions, interrupt vector table, violation, system call, interval timer, mode switch, context switch, character device, block device, network device, programmed I/O, memory-mapped I/O, polling, DMA, cache.

Interrupt vector table, dispatch table, system call library, int vs. syscall instructions.