I've taught computer science in ugrad and grad school but only took one course, that AFTER I taught the ugrad course, and it was a silly course. I know more th

I've taught computer science in ugrad and grad school but only took one course, that AFTER I taught the ugrad course, and it was a silly course. I know more than I indicated, but I wanted to say that the questions need to be more clear, Yes, preemptive is like handling a keyboard interrupt. Mutex likely stands for 'mutual exclusion' and typically is supported by a library with various features. Spin locks were an old IBM trick where it actually was faster to let a 'task' just go into a loop on something than use something like a Mutex that would involve the dispatcher -- the dispatcher could be slow. But spin locks had a bad reputation for spinning forever and were a standard system managment problem. I'd advise the hiring guy first to get a book, maybe like you listed, and go to a university with a good CS department and buy a hour with a good OS CS prof and get an outline of what he needed to hire.