Preliminary concepts of object-oriented programming in Java. Ability to use code editors and compilers.
The exam includes a written test. The written test includes 4 open-ended questions (3 exercises on the theoretical aspects of the course, and one exercise on the cuncurrent programming in Java). The written test lasts two hours. Only those who obtain a score higher than 18/30 are admitted to the oral test. The oral test consists in the discussion of the written test and related questions. The final mark of the overall integrated course is given by the average sum of the scores achieved in the two modules.
Theoretical principles, architecture styles, functionality and management policies of operating systems; basic introduction to concurrent programming with the Java language.
Main topics: process management (creation, synchronization, and communication); processor scheduling; deadlock prevention, avoidance, and recovery; main-memory management; virtual memory management (swapping, paging, segmentation and page-replacement algorithms); control of disks and other input/output devices; file-system structure and implementation; and multi-threading and synchronization aspects in the Java programming language. The last topic include the sub-tpics: multi-threading in the Java platform (Thread objects, defining and starting a thread, pausing and interrupting a thread, thread joins), thread interference and memory consistency errors, synchronization and mutual exclusion problem, liveness properties of a program (starvation, deadlock, livelock), typical concurrency problems (producer-consumer, readers-writer, the dining philosophers, the coke machine, etc.), synchronization mechanisms and their practical realization with the package library java.util.concurrent (semaphores, intrinsic object locks and synchronized methods/blocks, lock objects and condition variables), coordination idioms (guarded blocks, locking, atomic access). Each of these sub-topic is illustrated with practical code examples as solutions to typical concurrency problems and guided exercises in labs.
