Teaching Operating Systems with Tracing
A set of open-source courses for students and software practitioners
Robert N. M. Watson and George V. Neville-Neil
We have observed a decline in the teaching of operating systems
fundamentals in a period where it is becoming more important, in large
part due to a lack of contemporary and re-usable material, and
training for people to teach operating systems. Where such courses
still exist they work with toys rather than real systems, avoid
interesting micro-architectural elements required to achieve
performance on contemporary systems, omit coverage of the features
developers are most likely to engage with e.g., multi-threading,
multi-core hardware, and networking. Finally, and perhaps most
importantly, they fail to teach suitable experimental methodology to
allow developers to evaluate whether their performance work is
effective.
It is our belief that giving students the ability to observe, at run
time, the inner workings of a complex system, such as the
FreeBSD Operating System, provides them with
a clearer understanding of how such systems ought to work in theory,
how they actually work in practice, and how to design experiments to
tell the difference between the two.
These courses are applicable to both University students and
practitioners of software engineering.
The preferred text for the course is
The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System, 2nd Ed.
The material contained herein is shared under a permissive,
open-source license with the intent that it is widely
adopted.
Note that the practitioner course requires the
Metropolitan Beamer theme to be
installed before the slides can be compiled.