Week 2: CST 334

This week we learned about process abstraction, limited direct execution, process scheduling, and multi-level feedback. It was interesting to learn about the distinction between programs (instructions stored on a computer) and processes (those programs running within the computer). Also, it's interesting to see a lot of the concepts from past courses come up again, like stacks, heaps, registers (and computer architecture topics in general). Because so much of this is abstracted by the operating system, and then user applications on top of that, it's easy to lose track of how complex it is just to run a program on one's computer. From our standpoint, we don't notice processes stopping and starting as they share the computer's processing.

This week I also looked into papers I could use for a research project. One that caught my eye was a paper on Meta's service mesh. I have to look into it more to see how it relates to operating systems and what we're learning in the course, but I would like to learn more about how large companies manage their microservices and how that helps them make their product available to millions of people.

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