[luau] ics412: operating systems

[Charles Lockhart]

Ah, I did misunderstand one thing in his email: he is going to allow the 
class to diverge into two paths, and allow people to either do the Linux 
based projects, or switch to the os simlator.  Unfortunately, I would 
guess that if a majority of people wuss out, this'll be the last 
semester they offer a Linus based os course.

-Charles

Charles Lockhart wrote:

>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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-- 
Charles Lockhart
Embedded Software Engineer
NASA InfraRed Telescope Facility
http://irtf.ifa.hawaii.edu/~lockhart
lockhart at irtf.ifa.hawaii.edu
(808)956-7635