Experience with an Incremental Approach to Teaching Single Processor Operating Systems

Given their complexity operating systems have beena teaching challenge in terms of both course design and coursedelivery. Being complex software artifacts, they challenge thestudent by bringing together a number of concepts and algorithmsfrom different aspects of the body of knowledge inComputer Science. This inherent "nonlinearity" (of the way inwhich the concepts come together) is in stark contrast to thelinear and time bound structure of any course delivery. Finally, significant student preparation is required to even reasonablygrasp the intricacies of engineering design that an operatingsystem involves. We address this age-old problem in a novelway. We develop an incremental approach to building operatingsystems for pedagogic purposes. At each stage we introducereasonably achievable design challenges. Instead of attempting tocoerce linearity to present an essentially nonlinear subject matter, we start from a simple, but nonlinear, model of an operatingsystem and gradually expand the nonlinearity. In this paper, wepresent the basis of our design and report our experience withits first delivery.