CSU Monterey Bay Learning Journal

Looking back on CST334, I can confidently say that this course pushed me in ways I didn’t expect, especially with the breadth and depth of material covered. One of my biggest takeaways is just how much is happening “under the hood” of computers that we often take for granted. Topics like inode addressing, disk access delays, memory hierarchy, and virtual address translation gave me a much clearer picture of how operating systems manage resources efficiently. Working through problems where I had to calculate inode locations, determine transfer delays based on seek and rotational latency, or translate virtual to physical addresses really showed me the importance of precision and attention to detail. These aren’t just abstract concepts; they are the backbone of how files are stored, accessed, and secured. I also found scheduling algorithms like Shortest Duration fascinating because they highlighted how small design choices in the OS can dramatically impact performance and fairness. At th...

This week, our focus shifted significantly from the CPU and memory to the world of I/O devices and data persistence. We began with the general architecture of I/O devices, and I found it particularly interesting to trace the evolution of communication from inefficient programmed I/O, where the CPU is tied up just waiting, to more advanced techniques like interrupts and DMA that allow for true multitasking. From there, we took a deep dive into the classic hard disk drive. Understanding its physical geometry, with platters, tracks, and sectors, was key for me to grasp why its performance characteristics are so different from RAM. Breaking down disk access time into seek time, rotational delay, and transfer time made it clear that the physical movement of the disk arm is the biggest performance bottleneck, which directly explains why intelligent disk scheduling is so important. Building on that hardware foundation, the rest of the week was dedicated to the file system abstraction. We star...