Student Extended Xinu

Overview

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

Students will learn to extend an operating system by adding kernel level and user level applications. Given a functional Embedded Xinu operating system the students will have to understand and manipulate existing operating system code to create additional operating system features. To add more applications to the operating system students will have to understand the interactions between the program in design and the operating system's device and kernel interaction calls. Programming for embedded devices allows students to engage in development on small resource constrained environments. Through extending the existing Embedded Xinu operating system a student learns to use and understand code not written by the student and develops advanced operating system concepts.

Potential Course Structure

An course using the below course outline or something similar will introduce students to some fundamental and advanced concepts of operating systems combined with the development in a resource constrained environment.

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
08			Main Memory and Virtual Memory
09			File System Interface				Preemption and Synchronization
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
14			Distributed System Structures
15			Distributed File Systems				Ultra-Tiny File System