An Open Source Laboratory for Operating Systems Projects




Introduction

Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) is a private
university with approximately 2800 undergraduate
students and over 400 computer science majors. As part
of its core curriculum the Computer Science Department
offers students an introductory Operating Systems course.
The course covers traditional topics in operating systems,
such as process management, synchronization and
memory management using well-known texts
[SG98,Tan92]. The course has been taught using the
general purpose Unix computing facilities provided by the
Campus Computing Center. Typically, students did
projects to synchronize among a set of Unix processes or
threads, and virtual memory system projects using userlevel
simulations. The nature of the projects means that
students get experience with “system programming”
while learning about operating systems concepts. Our
systems courses were successful in providing students a
practical exposure to systems calls through projects that
access the many operating system services from user
programs, but had not been able to provide an adequate
`hands-on' experience with operating system internals.


Approach

Our approach involves three steps: 1) configure both the
hardware and software in the Fossil lab to support open
source experimentation; 2) develop projects which allow
practical exploration of core operating system concepts
using the Fossil lab; and 3) evaluate the impact of the Lab
in order to disseminate results and tune projects for more
effective impact.

Configuration

The Fossil lab has 30 Intel Pentium 3 600 MHz desktop
computers and 1 server. We employed a graduate student
for 3 months during the summer to assist in setting up the
lab and in developing the projects to be used in the
courses. This same student then stayed on through the
year as a teaching assistant for the OS course, doubling as
the Fossil system administrator.


Evaluation

Thus far, we have used the Fossil lab successfully in one
operating systems course. We evaluate the effectiveness of
the Fossil lab for this course by analyzing feedback from the
Teaching Assistants and through a survey of the students that
used the Fossil lab compared with a survey of students that
took a previous, non-Fossilized Operating systems class.


Conclusion
The increasing popularity of today’s open source
operating systems provide the opportunity for students in
operating systems courses to design and implement
course projects that modify real, production quality operating
system code. In this work, we have presented the
configuration and evaluation of the Fossil lab, an unrestricted,
yet safe environment for students to gain hands-on experience
with real operating system code.