The Nachos instructional operating system

  • Authors:

  • Wayne A. Christopher;Steven J. Procter;Thomas E. Anderson

  • Affiliations:

  • University of California at Berkeley;University of California at Berkeley;University of California at Berkeley

  • Venue:
  • USENIX'93 Proceedings of the USENIX Winter 1993 Conference Proceedings on USENIX Winter 1993 Conference Proceedings
  • Year:
  • 1993

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Abstract

In teaching operating systems at an undergraduate level, we belive that it is important to provide a project that is realistic enought to show how real operating systems work, yet is simple enough that the students can understand and modify it in significant ways. A number of these instructional saystems have been created over the last two decades, but recent advances in hardware and software design, along with the increasing power of available computational resources, have changed the basis for many of the tradeoffs made by these systems. we have implemented an instructional operating system, called Nachos, and designed a series of assignments to go with it. Our system includes CPU and device simulatiors, and it runs as a regulat UNIX process. Nachos illustrates and takes advantage of modern operating systems technology, such as threads and remote procedure calls, recent harware advances, such as RISC'S and the prevalence of memory hierarchies, and modern software design techniques, such as protocol layering and object-oriented programming. Nachos has been used to teach undergraduate operating systems classes at several universities with positive results.