Student Extended Xinu

Overview

Having students integrate advanced operating systems features and develop applications for a their own or a provided Xinu operating system 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.

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

• Intimate knowledge of embedded devices.
• Overview of the general and specific purpose of an operating system.
• Understanding concurrency and state flow diagrams.
• Understanding deadlock and starvation.
• Understanding the use of memory and virtual memory.
• Characteristics of serial and parallel devices.

Potential Course Structure

A course where having students integrate advanced operating systems features and develop applications for a their own or a provided Xinu operating system can be outlined to one similar to the one below. The example course layout has the listed applied assignments as well as several written assignments of problems developed with the textbook in mind or taken from the textbook.

Course Outline

Week			Topics				Assignments
01			C (basics) and OS Structures, Processes				Extending Xinu #1
02			C (functions, control flow) and Processes
03			C (pointers, arrays, structs) and Threads
04			CPU Scheduling				Extending Xinu #2
05			CPU Scheduling
06			Process Synchronization
07			Deadlocks
08			Main Memory and Virtual Memory				Extending Xinu #3
09			File System Interface
10			File System Implementation
11			Mass-Storage Structure
12			I/O Systems				Extending Xinu #4
13			Protection, Security and Distributed System Structures
14			Distributed System Structures
15			Distributed File Systems

Books

• There are no suggested books for this course outline.

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.