A down-to-earth educational operating system for up-in-the-cloud many-core architectures

  • Authors:

  • Michael Ziwisky;Kyle Persohn;Dennis Brylow

  • Affiliations:

  • Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI;Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI;Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI

  • Venue:
  • ACM Transactions on Computing Education (TOCE)
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

We present Xipx, the first port of a major educational operating system to a processor in the emerging class of many-core architectures. Through extensions to the proven Embedded Xinu operating system, Xipx gives students hands-on experience with system programming in a distributed message-passing environment. We expose the software primitives needed to maintain coherency between many cores in a system lacking specialized caching hardware. Our proposed series of laboratory assignments adds parallel thread execution and intercore message passing communication to a well-established OS curriculum.