Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!chaynes
From: chaynes@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (Chris Haynes)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: Minix as a teaching OS
Message-ID: <19039@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu>
Date: 29 Mar 89 22:10:20 GMT
Sender: chaynes@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu
Lines: 42


	    Tanenbaum's book is probably the clearest book ever written on
    the subject of OS's (Again, THANKS ANDY!!).  However, we've found that
    the code in the chapters dealing with things that Minix doesn't have
    (monitors, etc) is a litle too conceptual.  We are considering the use
    of SmallTalk or Scheme which can be used to implement schedulers,
    monitors, etc quite easily as real code which can be experimented with. 
    Does anyone have any opinions or ideas?	

    --
    Jason Coughlin
    ( jk0@clutx.clarkson.edu , jk0@clutx )

I've switched to Tanenbaum's book because it is the best way I've
seen to provide the software engineering experience of modifying a
large, well designed, system.  If this experience is provided in other
courses, there are several other good operating systems texts to
choose from, with the possibility of using laboratory environments that
are better than MINIX for studying process synchronization problems.

Until recently I used a laboratory environment based on Scheme with an
abstraction of timed preemption called engines [1].  I supplied the
class with a basic process scheduler which provided fork, block,
unblock, and semaphore operations, among others, and hid the details
of the engine mechanism.  (I will email this system, with basic
documentation, on request.)  This proved to be a very good environment
for solving classic synchronization problems using semaphores and for
projects implementing higher level synchronization mechanisms such as
monitors, message passing, remote procedure call, etc.  (Of course
this environment does not provide the realistic view of modern
operating system design and implementation offered by MINIX.)

Chris Haynes
Computer Science Dept.
Indiana University
Bloomington, IN 47405

chaynes@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu

[1] Christopher T. Haynes and Daniel P. Friedman, "Abstracting timed
    preemption with engines," COMPUTER LANGUAGES, Vol. 12, No. 2 (1987),
    109--121.