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From: ge@kunivv1.sci.kun.nl (Ge' Weijers)
Newsgroups: comp.edu,comp.software-eng
Subject: Re: CS education
Message-ID: <550@kunivv1.sci.kun.nl>
Date: 1 Dec 89 12:17:50 GMT
References: <16171@duke.cs.duke.edu> <7184@hubcap.clemson.edu>
Organization: University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Lines: 35

billwolf%hazel.cs.clemson.edu@hubcap.clemson.edu (William Thomas Wolfe, 2847 ) writes:


>   Everything about the internals of an OS which is hidden from its users.

>   The user interfaces to an OS may well require a bit of explanation as
>   to the definition of certain patterns of interface behavior; for example,
>   it may be necessary to give a scheduling model in order to explain to
>   the user the pattern of behavior which the operating system will present
>   at the user-scheduler interface, and it may be useful to convey to the
>   user the fact that all operating systems having the attribute "Uses The
>   Umptysquat Scheduling Algorithm" will present a similar pattern of 
>   behavior.  Enough to understand how to use the tool, and no more. 

I can't agree with that one. It is true that you can describe the semantics
of operations without using internal algorithms. But to analyse performance
of file systems you need to know quite a lot about them. And in DP applications
performance is critical. I recently heard a story about a big database
that was split into a number of smaller parts, one for each of the client
organisations of the database. This seemed a good decision, but the OS
did not support multiple processes sharing code. Swapping bogged down
the system critically, because there was much less locality of references
on the system. OS theory (not writing one) is a necessary part of CS eduaction.
After your students have acquired this theory you might as well use it
as a project in Software Engineering. (An OS course should NOT be a 'lets
build a mini Unix using traditional algorithms' course).


>   Bill Wolfe, wtwolfe@hubcap.clemson.edu

Ge' Weijers, ge@cs.kun.nl
Ge' Weijers                                    Internet/UUCP: ge@cs.kun.nl
Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science,   (uunet.uu.net!cs.kun.nl!ge)
University of Nijmegen, Toernooiveld 1         
6525 ED Nijmegen, the Netherlands              tel. +3180612483 (UTC-2)


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