Computer Science Department 1 An Open Source Laboratory for Operating Systems Projects * Mark Claypool, David Finkel, Craig Wills Computer Science Department Worcester Polytechnic Institute Worcester, MA 01609, USA * Partially funded by the National Science Foundation Course, Curriculum and Laboratory Improvement Grant DUE

Computer Science Department 2 Overview Goal: Provide projects for students in operating systems courses using a real operating system Lab: Established a lab with PC’s running Linux. Developed projects for two courses Evaluation

Computer Science Department 3 About WPI Technological university in Massachusetts Undergraduate enrollment of 2700 About 600 Computer Science majors 7-week undergraduate terms Project orientation to curriculum and courses Practical, career-oriented students

Computer Science Department 4 Systems Courses at WPI Operating Systems, 3 rd year course. Distributed Computing Systems, 4 th year 3 – 4 large scale programming assignments In the past, course have used commercial operating systems (Unix) or simulated environments for programming assignments Lab has now been used in 4 course offerings

Computer Science Department 5 The F/OSL Lab Free / Open Systems Lab (“Fossil”) 30 PCs, running Linux operating system Protected from campus network by firewall Custom CD-ROM for re-installing OS Each machine assigned to a single student group for the term; they have complete root access to their machine, guest access to other machines

Computer Science Department 6 Project 0 Designed to familiarize students with Linux, root access, OS utilities Cookbook style assignment Tasks: –Set up a new user account –Use find / grep to locate code –Install a new file system, re-compile kernel

Computer Science Department 7 Project 1 (O.S.) Modify the Linux Scheduler Tasks: –Locate, study the current scheduler –Modify it to implement fair scheduling –Compare the performance of standard scheduling vs. fair scheduling

Computer Science Department 8 Project 2 (D.C.S.) Display contents of file system data structures to user (i-node and superblock) Tasks: –Write and register new system calls to extract information from these data structures –Develop a user application to call these system calls and display the information

Computer Science Department 9 Evaluation Student Questionnaire in Traditional Course and Fossil Course 1 – strongly disagree to 4 – strongly agree Responses: –“I think the course material and projects helped me to gain a good understanding of operating systems in terms of the services they provide at the system call level.” Traditional Course: 3.0; Fossil 3.3

Computer Science Department 10 Evaluation 2 –“I think the course material and projects helped me to gain a good understanding of operating systems internals.” Traditional Course: 2.9; Fossil: 3.3 –“I think the course material and projects gave me experience that would help me write or modify portions of an operating system.” Traditional Course: 2.6; Fossil: 3.1

Computer Science Department 11 Evaluation 3 Open-ended responses: –“Making alterations to the Linux kernel taught me far more than any other part of the course.” –“When the kernel crashed, we had to manually reboot the system, which took an awful lot of time.” –“I have seen people take other OS courses and they did not dive into the material as far as we did because they will not let you modify the OS on any of the school servers.”

Computer Science Department 12 Instructors’ Evaluation Many students appreciated the challenge of working with a real operating system Weaker students needed a lot of help. The TAs were available in the lab, and had to exercise some judgment about how much help to give A lot of work for the instructors, too

Computer Science Department 13 Conclusions Implemented a lab that allowed students to work on operating systems internals Developed a variety of projects to demonstrate different OS principles Future: Institute different kinds of support mechanisms for students of different levels of background, ability.

Computer Science Department 14 Shameless Advertisement We have applied for NSF support for workshops for Summers of 2002, 2003 to work with O.S. instructors to develop projects for their courses using the Open Source Projects approach. If you’re interested in participating, contact:

Computer Science Department 15 An Open Source Laboratory for Operating Systems Projects * Mark Claypool, David Finkel, Craig Wills Computer Science Department Worcester Polytechnic Institute Worcester, MA 01609, USA {claypool | finkel | * Partially funded by the National Science Foundation Course, Curriculum and Laboratory Improvement Grant DUE