[luau] Re C

William N Luoma luoma at hawaii.edu
Sun Sep 29 23:00:00 PDT 2002


charles would go!

>
> Don't know how many people know this, but this semesters ics412,
operating
> systems class, is (maybe was) based on Linux (the main reason I'm taking
> the class).  I thought it was a pretty good idea, an introduction to
> operating systems using a real operating system.  Apparently the class
> (and I guess many os classes at other universities as well) is typically
> based on os simulations, and that previously ics412 was taught using an
os
> simulation written in Java.
>
> From reading the instructor's email, apparently he's considering
switching
> from Linux back to this previous format of using the java os
> emulator/simulator instead.  This was based on the results of the last
> project (all the projects are from Gary Nutt's "Kernel Projects for
> Linux"): seems like a lot of people didn't turn it in, or did a poor job
> of it (the project was to write your own shell that was capable of
> executing commands, redirecting stdin/stdout from/to files, piping the
> results of one command into the input of another, most of it was
trivial,
> though I confess I had problems with the piping between processes).
>
> From
> reading his email to the class it looks like the problems (excuses?)
> people had were that they weren't good enough C programmers, Linux isn't
> documented well enough, and os stuff is hard.  All of these answers kind
> of blow me away.
>
> This is a senior level computer science course, and none
> of the C programming for the projects is very difficult.  Shouldn't
> comp-sci grads be able to program?
>
> As for Linux documentation, there's
> tutorials all over the net, there's tons of books, there's news groups,
> user groups
> (LUAU for instance...), the man pages, etc.  And then there's the
source,
> dammit, use the source.  If I remember correctly, they used to use UNIX
> for os courses because they had the source, and when the source was
> closed(?) Tanenbaum wrote minix to replace it.
>
> I'll agree with the "os stuff is hard" argument, but jeez, that's why we
> have a class on it.
>
> So, I guess I'm wondering if I'm dorking out here, and am just flat out
> wrong.  Thoughts?
>
> -Charles
>





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