PortOS: an educational operating system for the Post-PC environment

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we describe PortOS, an educational operating system designed to complement undergraduate and graduate level classes on operating systems. PortOS is a complete user-level operating system project, with phases covering concurrency, synchronization, networking and file systems. It focuses particularly on ad hoc and peer-to-peer distributed computing on mobile devices. This paper discusses alternative approaches to operating system projects, and presents our particular design point along with pedagogical justifications.

REFERENCES

• 1: Michael Bedy , Steve Carr , Xianlong Huang , Ching-Kuang Shene, A visualization system for multithreaded programming, Proceedings of the thirty-first SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education, p.1-5, March 07-12, 2000, Austin, Texas, United States
• 2: Sung-Eun Choi , E. Christopher Lewis, A study of common pitfalls in simple multi-threaded programs, Proceedings of the thirty-first SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education, p.325-329, March 07-12, 2000, Austin, Texas, United States
• 3: W. Christopher, S. Procter, and T. Anderson. The Nachos instructional operating system. In Proceedings of the 1993 Winter USENIX Conference, pages 479-488, January 1993.
• 4: John Dickinson, Operating systems projects built on a simple hardware simulator, Proceedings of the thirty-first SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education, p.320-324, March 07-12, 2000, Austin, Texas, United States
• 5: John Hennessy, The Future of Systems Research, Computer, v.32 n.8, p.27-33, August 1999 [doi>10.1109/2.781631]
• 6: David B. Johnson and David A. Maltz. Dynamic Source Routing in Ad Hoc Wireless Networks. In Mobile Computing, edited by Tomasz Imielinski and Hank Korth, Chapter 5, pages 153-181, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996.
• 7: Mauro Morsiani , Renzo Davoli, Learning operating systems structure and implementation through the MPS computer system simulator, The proceedings of the thirtieth SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education, p.63-67, March 24-28, 1999, New Orleans, Louisiana, United States
• 8: Gary J. Nutt, Operating Systems: A Modern Perspective, Lab Update, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 2001
• 9: Charles E. Perkins , Elizabeth M. Royer, Ad-hoc On-Demand Distance Vector Routing, Proceedings of the Second IEEE Workshop on Mobile Computer Systems and Applications, p.90, February 25-26, 1999
• 10: Abraham Silberschatz , Peter Baer Galvin, Operating System Concepts, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 1997
• 11: David A. Solomon , Helen Custer, Inside Windows NT, Microsoft Press, Redmond, WA, 1998
• 12: Andrew S. Tanenbaum , Albert S. Woodhull, Operating systems (2nd ed.): design and implementation, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1997
• 13: Mark Weiser, Some computer science issues in ubiquitous computing, Communications of the ACM, v.36 n.7, p.75-84, July 1993 [doi>10.1145/159544.159617]