Summary

This chapter covered a lot of ground, so good job on doing all that legwork. We learned a little bit about how CPUs and operating systems have evolved from a historical perspective and the difference between non-preemptive and preemptive multitasking. We discussed the difference between concurrency and parallelism, talked about the role of the operating system, and learned that system calls are the primary way for us to interact with the host operating system. You’ve also seen how the CPU and the operating system cooperate through an infrastructure designed as part of the CPU.

Lastly, we went through a diagram on what happens when you issue a network call. You know there are at least three different ways for us to deal with the fact that the I/O call takes some time to execute, and we have to decide which way we want to handle that waiting time.

This covers most of the general background information we need so that we have the same definitions and overview before...