Teaching principles of shared resource management with the MOSES2 microcomputer operating system environment

• Authors: Robert England
• Venue: Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges
• Year: 2006

Every modern multiprogramming computer operating system must effectively manage and protect resources that are shared among the different user processes that run simultaneously on the system. Resource sharing allows for computation speed-up, data consistency, and data availability. This paper describes a sequence of operating system kernel programming projects and how these projects teach shared resource management through student hands-on design and implementation of resource management constructs. The kernel projects are implemented to run on the Moses2 microcomputer operating system environment simulator, which provides a simulated hardware virtual machine plus a collection of user processes that run on the Moses2 virtual machine to test students' implementations of a variety of kernel services.