2400020 – Windows Internals (Proseminar Operating System Internals)

Windows is one of the most widely deployed operating systems today, dominating the world’s desktop market with a 76% share and running over 96% of all PC games. Starting with the Windows 8 product family, Microsoft brings the same operating system to new form factors, instruction architectures (ARM) and computing environments (Azure). In every case, the NT kernel and system architecture builds the foundation of Windows. The Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and starting with Windows 11, the Android Subsystem, open the possibility to run a wide range of applications directly, unmodified on Windows. In this seminar, the participants will delve into the internals of Windows and research and present Windows-specific concepts and potentially compare them to implementations in other operating systems. For the seminar, each participant will prepare a report (6 pages) and a short talk (15-20 min) about an individually assigned topic. The grade will be based on the quality of the report, the proficiency of the talk, and the liveliness of the participant’s participation in discussing the other talks. A successful participation in the Operating Systems exam (Betriebssysteme Klausur) is a pre-requisite for this seminar.