Student Built Xinu

Overview

Having students build their own Xinu is one of the potential tracks presented for a professor that is Teaching With Xinu.

A student built operating system puts the student in the trenches of operating system development. The student will become intimately involved with the inner workings of an operating system. This will give the student a better understanding of the various systems that work together behind the scenes while an operating system is running. Operating systems topics that can be incorporated in a student built Xinu course include: memory management, scheduling, concurrent processing, device management, file systems and others.

Course Outcomes

Course development can parallel learning objectives and topics associated with many Communication and Networking courses. [1]

Topics

• Overview of operating systems
• Operating system principles
• Concurrency
• Scheduling and dispatch
• Memory management
• Device management
• Security and protection
• File systems
• Evaluating system performance

Learning Objectives

• Discuss the history of operating systems.
• Overview of the general and specific purpose of an operating system.
• Understanding concurrency and state flow diagrams.
• Understanding deadlock and starvation.
• Ability to decipher between scheduling algorithms.
• Understanding the use of memory and virtual memory.
• Characteristics of serial and parallel devices.
• Deciphering the concepts behind various file systems
• Understanding the necessity of security and locating potential system security holes

Potential Course Structure

An Operating Systems course using the below course outline or something similar will introduce students to some fundamental concepts of operating systems combined with the basics of networking and communications. Topics include: memory management, scheduling, concurrent processing, device management, file systems, networking, security, and system performance. A similar course structure is followed by Dr. Dennis Brylow at Marquette University in his sophomore level Operating Systems course. Most of the assignments where students are building Embedded Xinu are done in teams of two.

Course Outline

Week			Topics				Assignments
01			C (basics) and OS Structures, Processes				C Basics
02			C (functions, control flow) and Processes
03			C (pointers, arrays, structs) and Threads				C Structs and Pointers
04			CPU Scheduling				Synchronous Serial Driver
05			CPU Scheduling
06			Process Synchronization				Context Switch and Non-Preemptive Scheduling
07			Deadlocks				Priority Scheduling and Process Termination	Priority Scheduling & Preemption
08			Main Memory and Virtual Memory
09			File System Interface				Preemption & Synchronization	Interprocess Communication
10			File System Implementation
11			Mass-Storage Structure				Delta Queues
12			I/O Systems				Heap Memory
13			Protection, Security and Distributed System Structures				Asynchronous Device Driver	Ultra-Tiny File System
14			Distributed System Structures
15			Distributed File Systems				Ultra-Tiny File System

Books

• Abraham Silberschatz, Peter Baer Galvin, and Greg Gagne, Operating Systems Concepts, 7th Edition, John Wiley & Sons, ISBN #0-471-69466-5.

• Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Richie, The C Programming Language, Prentice-Hall, 1978.

References

[1] Course topics and learning objectives have been adapted from the ACM's Computing Curricula 2001 Computer Science.

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This work funded in part by NSF grant DUE-CCLI-0737476.