Hi all, We've kicked this around before, but I don't think we went into depth. I'm thinking about an operating systems course next fall, and wonder what kind of ideas might be floating around in all y'alls heads.
Context/Background =============== I'm teaching Computer Organization this term with "Elements of Computing Systems." I think it is a marvelous text, and I love constructive/hands-on approaches to teaching computing. When I studied Operating Systems, we used NachOS. http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~tom/nachos/ Next Semester =============== I'm teaching Operating Systems in the fall. I could go the NachOS route. It would be very cool to do something with FreeRTOS, perhaps even with real hardware (a lab of R-Pis, the BeagleBone, or perhaps an AllWinner A10-based board?). Or, even, to contribute to/write/rewrite components and explore performance/correctness/etc. as a result of what we do. (For example, what if we remove the (likely very savvy) scheduler from FreeRTOS and replace it with a simple round-robin scheduler?) http://www.freertos.org Question/Ask =============== I think we have a colleague on the list from the FreeRTOS project. If I want my students to have a constructive/hands-on exposure to operating systems, could we sketch out (in this space or elsewhere) what a course built around FreeRTOS might look like? (Ideas follow... but, it's brainstormy at this point.) For example, when one goes the NachOS route, students write an NFS component, then a scheduler, then a filesystem, etc. I'm not suggesting that we *have* to do those kinds of things, but they're what are *in my head*. And, I don't have personal experience (at this moment) with FreeRTOS... so, I have reading to do. And it's hard for me to imagine what I might do. But, textbook choices are coming up, and I have to decide if I'll use a text, or just use articles from the ACM/IEEE, etc. So, I thought I'd throw this half-baked question out to the hive mind, and see what kinds of ideas come back. My primary concern is time: that is, the from-scratch course design for next fall will take a lot of time, whereas a NachOS approach is well traveled, and I'll find a lot of resources to support me. But, it might be that I can follow a NachOS-like roadmap, but use a smaller codebase that is actually used in the world, and do something interesting with it that is of high value to the students. Thoughts? Many thanks, Matt
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