Experience with MINIX in an operating systems lab

Abstract

Most standard undergraduate operating systems courses teach theory and concepts, without exposing students to the detailed internal operation or source code of an actual operating system. Tanenbaum's MINIX operating system is designed to give students "hands-on" experience with the internals of an operating system in order to illustrate the theory and concepts. This paper describes the use of MINIX in an operating systems laboratory at the University of Vermont.

References

1. [1] Andrew S. Tanenbaum. Operating Systems Design and Implementation. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1987.
2. [2] Bell Telephone Laboratories. UNIX Time-Sharing System: UNIX Programmer's Manual (version 7). Vol. 1 and 2, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, NY, 1983.
3. [3] R. van Renesse, J. M. van Staveren, and A. S. Tanenbaum. "The Performance of the Amoeba Distributed Operating System." Software - Practice and Experience. Vol. 19, No. 3, March 1989.
4. [4] Marc J. Rochkind. Advanced UNIX Programming . Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1985.
5. [5] Keith Haviland and Ben Salama. UNIX System Programming. Addison Wesley, Reading, Mass., 1987.

Index Terms

• Social and professional topics

  • Professional topics

    • Computing education

      • Computing education programs

        • Computer science education

• Software and its engineering

  • Software organization and properties

    • Contextual software domains

      • Operating systems