An Open Source Laboratory for Operating Systems Projects


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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.


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.
The operating systems course was primarily composed of CS
majors, but nearly a third of the class is from other
disciplines, especially Electrical Engineering. Most students
had their own PCs in their dorms, but only 1/3 of them ran
Linux on their PCs.