Awk-Linux: A Lightweight Operating
Yung-Pin Cheng, Jing Lin · 2008
Most well-known instructional operating systems are complex, particularly if their companion software is taken into account. It takes considerable time and effort to craft these sys- tems, and their complexity may introduce maintenance and evo- lution problems. In this paper, a courseware called Awk-Linux is proposed. Awk-Linux can be crafted relatively more easily and it does not depend on any hardware simulator or platform. The basic hardware functions provided by Awk-Linux include timer inter- rupt and page-fault interrupt, which are simulated through pro- gram instrumentation over user programs. Course projects based on Awk-Linux provide source code extracted and simplified from a Linux kernel.Results of this study indicate that the projects helped studentsbettertounderstandinner workingsofoperating systems. Index Terms—Computer science education, courseware, oper- ating system kernels, operating systems.