Adaptive skill practice — find your level, get sharper.

Operating Systems practice

Processes, memory, and the kernel boundary

How the operating system works (Unix/Linux flavor) — processes and the fork/exec model, virtual memory and paging, CPU scheduling, system calls and the user/kernel boundary, signals and IPC, file descriptors and "everything is a file", inodes and links, and the permission model (rwx, octal, setuid/sticky). Evergreen OS mechanisms that systems interviews probe. Part of the Developer track.

• Meets you at your level — never too easy, never too hard.

• Adapts every question to how you’re doing.

• Tracks your level over time. Skill practice, not a test.

New here? Read the Operating Systems guide

A free 16-minute primer — the mental model, the mistakes beginners make, and what to practise first.

Curriculum

135 concepts across 24 chapters, from foundations through advanced practice — each one a concept the adaptive question bank can teach and test.

A. Processes: identity, state and lifecycle

B. Creating and replacing a process

C. Threads and context switching

D. Signals

E. Scheduling and the run queue

F. Virtual memory, paging and reclaim

G. Memory mapping, allocation and limits

H. The user/kernel boundary and system calls

I. File descriptors and the open-file model

J. Filesystems, inodes and links

K. Paths, mounts and the directory tree

L. Permission bits and ownership

M. Privilege, capabilities and sandboxing

N. Storage, the page cache and durability

O. Interprocess communication

P. I/O models and event multiplexing

Q. Namespaces and containers

R. cgroups v2 and resource control

S. Boot and init

T. systemd and service management

U. procfs, sysfs and inspecting a live system

V. Dynamic linking and program loading

W. Performance and observability

X. The shell and the process runtime environment

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