The EOS laboratory environment for a course in operating systems

Abstract

This paper describes a laboratory environment for teaching operating systems. The EOS (Exploratory Operating Systems) lab was developed with a National Science Foundation ILI grant to be used in conjunction with a traditional operating systems (OS) course. The main goal of the EOS project was to improve the teaching of operating system principles without the necessity of a special purpose laboratory and the addition to the curriculum of a second course in OS. The EOS labs are summarized and a CPU scheduling lab is described in some detail. A standardized testing instrument was used to compare class performance before and after adding the lab to the OS course. Preliminary results show an improvement attributable to the EOS laboratory. The author's experience in building a workstation laboratory from an externally funded grant is described.