article

Running on the bare metal with GeekOS

Authors:

David Hovemeyer,

Jeffrey K. Hollingsworth,

Bobby BhattacharjeeAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, Volume 36, Issue 1

Pages 315 - 319

https://doi.org/10.1145/1028174.971411

Published: 01 March 2004 Publication History

Abstract

Undergraduate operating systems courses are generally taught using one of two approaches: abstract or concrete. In the abstract approach, students learn the concepts underlying operating systems theory, and perhaps apply them using user-level threads in a host operating system. In the concrete approach, students apply concepts by working on a real operating system kernel. In the purest manifestation of the concrete approach, students implement operating system projects that run on real hardware.GeekOS is an instructional operating system kernel which runs on real hardware. It provides the minimum functionality needed to schedule threads and control essential devices on an x86 PC. On this foundation, we have developed projects in which students build processes, semaphores, a multilevel feedback scheduler, paged virtual memory, a filesystem, and inter-process communication. We use the Bochs emulator for ease of development and debugging. While this approach (tiny kernel run on an emulator) is not new, we believe GeekOS goes further towards the goal of combining realism and simplicity than previous systems have.

References

[1]

B. Atkin and E. G. Sirer. PortOS: An Educational Operating System for the Post-PC Environment. In Proceedings of the ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, 2002.]]

Digital Library

[2]

GNU Binutils: http://www.gnu.org/software/binutils, 2003.]]

[3]

Bochs: http://bochs.sourceforge.net, 2003.]]

[4]

W. A. Christopher, S. J. Procter, and T. E. Anderson. The Nachos Instructional Operating System. In Proceedings of the 1993 Winter USENIX Conference, pages 481--488, 1993.]]

Digital Library

[5]

J. Dickinson. Operating Systems Projects Built on a Simple Hardware Simulator. In Proceedings of the ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, 2000.]]

Digital Library

[6]

J. L. Donaldson. An Architecture-Dependent Operating System Project Sequence. In Proceedings of the ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, 2001.]]

Digital Library

[7]

G. Fankhauser, C. Conrad, E. Zitzler, and B. Plattner. Topsy --- A Teachable Operating System: http://www.tik.ee.ethz.ch/~topsy/book/topsy_1.1.pdf, 2000.]]

[8]

GCC Home Page: http://gcc.gnu.org, 2003.]]

[9]

GDB: The GNU Project Debugger: http://www.gnu.org/software/gdb, 2003.]]

[10]

GeekOS: http://geekos.sourceforge.net, 2003.]]

[11]

D. A. Holland, A. T. Lim, and M. I. Seltzer. A New Instructional Operating System. In Proceedings of the ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, 2002.]]

Digital Library

[12]

Intel. Intel Architecture Software Developer's Manual. Intel, 1997.]]

[13]

T. Jim, G. Morrisett, D. Grossman, M. Hicks, J. Cheney, and Y. Wang. Cyclone: A Safe Dialect of C. In Proceedings of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference, pages 275--288, June 2002.]]

Digital Library

[14]

The Netwide Assembler: http://nasm.sourceforge.net, 2003.]]

[15]

T. Nicholas and J. A. Barchanski. TOS - An Educational Distributed Operating System in Java. In Proceedings of the ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, 2001.]]

Digital Library

[16]

D. M. Ritchie and K. Thompson. The UNIX Time-Sharing System. Communications of the ACM, 17(7), 1974.]]

Digital Library

[17]

T. Shanley. Protected Mode Software Architecture. Addison-Wesley, 1996.]]

Digital Library

[18]

A. Silberschatz and P. Galvin. Applied Operating System Concepts. John Wiley and Sons, 1999.]]

Digital Library

[19]

A. S. Tanenbaum and A. S. Woodhull. Operating Systems: Design and Implementation. Prentice Hall, second edition, 1997.]]

Digital Library

[20]

F. van Gilluwe. The Undocumented PC: A Programmer's Guide to I/O, CPUs, and Fixed Memory Areas. Addison-Wesley, second edition, 1996.]]

Digital Library

[21]

Virtutech: Simulators for hardware and software engineering: http://www.virtutech.com, 2003.]]

Cited By

Gebhard AForden JLaufenberg OBrylow DStephenson BStone JBattestilli LRebelsky SShoop L(2024)Using Embedded Xinu to Teach Operating Systems on Baremetal RISC-VProceedings of the 55th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 110.1145/3626252.3630959(380-386)Online publication date: 7-Mar-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3626252.3630959
Golemanov TGolemanova E(2020)Using TOST in Teaching Operating Systems and Concurrent Programming ConceptsAdvances in Science, Technology and Engineering Systems Journal10.25046/aj0506105:6(96-107)Online publication date: 2020
https://doi.org/10.25046/aj050610
Shantharama PThyagaturu AReisslein M(2020)Hardware-Accelerated Platforms and Infrastructures for Network Functions: A Survey of Enabling Technologies and Research StudiesIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2020.30082508(132021-132085)Online publication date: 2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3008250
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Running on the bare metal with GeekOS
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Computing education
      1. Computing education programs
        Computer science education
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Designing software
  2. Software organization and properties
    1. Contextual software domains
      1. Operating systems

Recommendations

Running on the bare metal with GeekOS
SIGCSE '04: Proceedings of the 35th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education

Undergraduate operating systems courses are generally taught using one of two approaches: abstract or concrete. In the abstract approach, students learn the concepts underlying operating systems theory, and perhaps apply them using user-level threads in ...
The Kaya OS project and the μMPS hardware emulator

Ideally, the most meaningful learning experience for students in an undergraduate OS course would be to develop fully-functional OS's on their own. This can be accomplished using μmps, a hardware emulator for a pedagogically undergraduate-appropriate ...
The Kaya OS project and the μMPS hardware emulator
ITiCSE '05: Proceedings of the 10th annual SIGCSE conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education

Ideally, the most meaningful learning experience for students in an undergraduate OS course would be to develop fully-functional OS's on their own. This can be accomplished using μmps, a hardware emulator for a pedagogically undergraduate-appropriate ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM SIGCSE Bulletin

ACM SIGCSE Bulletin Volume 36, Issue 1

March 2004

501 pages

ISSN:0097-8418

DOI:10.1145/1028174

Issue’s Table of Contents

SIGCSE '04: Proceedings of the 35th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
March 2004
544 pages
ISBN:1581137982
DOI:10.1145/971300
Conference Chairs:
Dan Joyce
Villanova University
,
Deborah Knox
The College of New Jersey
,
Program Chairs:
Wanda Dann
Ithaca College
,
Tom Naps
University of Wisconsin - Oshkosh

Copyright © 2004 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 March 2004

Published in SIGCSE Volume 36, Issue 1

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Article

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

48
Total Citations
View Citations
707
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)12
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)1

Reflects downloads up to 16 Nov 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Gebhard AForden JLaufenberg OBrylow DStephenson BStone JBattestilli LRebelsky SShoop L(2024)Using Embedded Xinu to Teach Operating Systems on Baremetal RISC-VProceedings of the 55th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 110.1145/3626252.3630959(380-386)Online publication date: 7-Mar-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3626252.3630959
Golemanov TGolemanova E(2020)Using TOST in Teaching Operating Systems and Concurrent Programming ConceptsAdvances in Science, Technology and Engineering Systems Journal10.25046/aj0506105:6(96-107)Online publication date: 2020
https://doi.org/10.25046/aj050610
Shantharama PThyagaturu AReisslein M(2020)Hardware-Accelerated Platforms and Infrastructures for Network Functions: A Survey of Enabling Technologies and Research StudiesIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2020.30082508(132021-132085)Online publication date: 2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3008250
Freitas LAncioto Ade Fátima Rodrigues Guimarães RMartins VDias Dde Paiva Guimarães M(2020)A Virtual Reality Simulator to Assist in Memory Management LecturesComputational Science and Its Applications – ICCSA 202010.1007/978-3-030-58820-5_58(810-825)Online publication date: 30-Sep-2020
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58820-5_58
Kankuzi B(2018)Balancing Theory and Practice in an Introductory Operating Systems CourseICT Education10.1007/978-3-030-05813-5_24(362-375)Online publication date: 31-Dec-2018
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05813-5_24
Putchala MBryant A(2016)Synchron-ITS: An Interactive Tutoring System to Teach Process Synchronization and Shared Memory Concepts in an Operating Systems Course2016 International Conference on Collaboration Technologies and Systems (CTS)10.1109/CTS.2016.0047(180-187)Online publication date: Oct-2016
https://doi.org/10.1109/CTS.2016.0047
Melletti MGoldweber MDavoli RDagienė VSchulte CJevsikova T(2015)The JaeOS Project and the μARM EmulatorProceedings of the 2015 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education10.1145/2729094.2742596(3-8)Online publication date: 22-Jun-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2729094.2742596
Román Otero RAravind ADecker AEiselt KAlphonce CTims J(2015)MiniOSProceedings of the 46th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education10.1145/2676723.2677299(430-435)Online publication date: 24-Feb-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2676723.2677299
Donaldson J(2008)Implementation of threads as an operating systems projectACM SIGCSE Bulletin10.1145/1352322.135220040:1(187-191)Online publication date: 12-Mar-2008
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1352322.1352200
Donaldson JDougherty JRodger SFitzgerald SGuzdial M(2008)Implementation of threads as an operating systems projectProceedings of the 39th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education10.1145/1352135.1352200(187-191)Online publication date: 12-Mar-2008
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1352135.1352200
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Issue’s Table of Contents