A project for operating systems simulation

Reviewer: Allan Louis Lucke

This seven-page paper is aimed squarely at computer science instructors who teach operating systems. A three-phase laboratory project for students that are enrolled in the author's operating systems class at the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay is described in reasonable detail. As the students apparently use a general-purpose multiprocessing mainframe, simulation of an operating system is the only practical way to give the students a feel for the critical aspects of job scheduling, memory allocation, swapping, and general interrupt handling. The paper is well written. The simulation techniques are reasonably described without the excruciating detail found in some similar papers, and yet fully enough explained to satisfy a competent computer science instructor. The flow of the presentation is smooth, natural, and logical. The major criticism this reviewer might levy would question the wisdom of thrusting students immediately into a multiprocessing operating system design simulation without first going through a single user operating system project. The author admits to a less than 50 percent successful completion rate, but nevertheless he feels that the project is successful. Operating systems instructors who teach by actually producing rudimentary operating systems on dedicated computers or who simply teach operating systems theory without lab exercises could profit by reading this paper.