PortOS: an educational operating system for the Post-PC environment
SIGCSE '02 Proceedings of the 33rd SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
Running on the bare metal with GeekOS
Proceedings of the 35th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
A survey of contemporary instructional operating systems for use in undergraduate courses
Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges
The Nachos instructional operating system
USENIX'93 Proceedings of the USENIX Winter 1993 Conference Proceedings on USENIX Winter 1993 Conference Proceedings
The pintos instructional operating system kernel
Proceedings of the 40th ACM technical symposium on Computer science education
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The importance of a comprehensive implementation component for undergraduate Operating Systems (OS) courses cannot be understated. Students not only develop deep insight and understanding of OS fundamentals, but they also learn key software engineering skills that only a large development project, such as implementing an OS, can teach. There are clear benefits to traditional OS projects where students program or alter real (Linux) kernel source or extend educational OS implementations; however, in our experience, bootstrapping such a project is a huge undertaking that may not be accessible in many classrooms. In this paper, we describe a different approach to the OS implementation assignment: A user-level Operating System simulation based on UNIX preemptive signaling and threading constructs called ucontext. We believe that this variation of the implementation assignment provides many of the same educational benefits as traditional low-level projects without many of the expensive start-up costs. This project has been taught for a number of years at the University of Pennsylvania and was recently overhauled for the Fall 2011 semester. This paper describes the current version of the project and our experiences teaching it to a class of 54 students.