Teaching With Xinu

Overview

Several 'How To' pages on this wiki allow professors and assistants to develop and build a classroom or laboratory setting enabling the modification and use of Embedded Xinu.

The set of pages found under the Teaching With Xinu category help a professor understand how to incorporate Embedded Xinu into a course for his or her department's curriculum. A professor can integrate Xinu into many different courses. The Embedded Xinu team at Marquette University has defined several potential course tracks as guidelines for professors. The provided course tracks should not be considered the only possibilities, but merely a few potential tracks of the many that can be developed to let a professor incorporate Embedded Xinu into a curriculum.

Tracks

Student Built 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.

Student Extended 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.

Networking With Xinu

A networking course incorporating Embedded Xinu can have students build a networking functionality into Embedded Xinu over the period of the course. Courses may vary in starting point; some choosing to use a core Embedded Xinu release and having students build the entire network stack and ethernet driver. While others may choose an Embedded Xinu release with the ethernet driver available so that the students can concentrate on other parts of the network stack. Network stack implementation assignments for students can parallel various networking lectures that traverse the stack over the course of the semester, terminating in the students implementing an application that uses the developed network stack.