Windows is one of the most widely deployed operating systems today, dominating the world’s desktop market with a 90% share and running over a third of all web servers on the Internet. With the Windows 8 product family, Microsoft brings the same operating system to new form factors (tablets, smartphones), instruction architectures (ARM) and computing environments (Azure). In every case, the NT kernel and system architecture builds the foundation of Windows.

In this seminar, the participants will delve into the internals of Windows and research and present Windows-specific concepts from the following areas and potentially compare them to implementations in other operating systems:

• General System Architecture
• Memory Management, Scheduling, I/O-Processing
• Security, Authentication and Access Control
• Storage Management and Improvements in Windows 8

For the seminar, each participant will prepare a report (6 pages) and a short talk (15 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.

The Windows Internals seminar is only intended for computer science (Informatik) students as part of their basic study (Bachelor). A successful participation in the Operating Systems exam (Betriebssysteme Klausur) is a pre-requisite for this seminar.