2010 Second International Workshop on Education Technology and Computer Science
Construction of the Practical Teaching System on
Operating Systems Course
Hongwei Li, Changhong Yin, Yaping Xu, Qingjun Guo
School of Computer Science and Engineering
Jiangsu Teachers University of Technology
Changzhou, China
jstulhw@gmail.com
Abstract—Operating systems course is very important. It is not
only the core of computer professional curriculum, but also the
base of designing or developing computer system software and
application software. However, the practical teaching of
operating systems course is difficult. In this article, we introduce
the construction of the practical teaching system on operating
systems and design a positive experimental environment
according to the teaching content through comparing lots of
operating systems practical textbooks from the perspective of
teaching practice, at last we provide a MOS system for students,
they can analyze, modify and extend the functions of MOS to
master operating systems concepts and theory.
Keywords-Practice Teaching; Operating Systems Course;
practical teaching platform
I. INTRODUCTION
The so-called practical teaching system refers to the
application of systematic scientific theory and methods, to
conduct an overall design using the composition of the various
elements of practical teaching, to form the optimal structure
and function of the practice of teaching system[1]. Its core is
to build effective practical teaching modules and design
practical teaching contents.
An operating system defines an abstraction of hardware
behavior with which programmers can control the hardware. It
also manages resource sharing among the computer’s users[2].
Over the years, operating systems and their abstractions have
become complex relative to typical application software.
The teaching purpose of Operating Systems course is for
students to know its basic concept, principle and method, to be
familiar with its management, control function and interface
function between users and computers, to know its function
and position in computer system and its relation with hardware
and other software, and to analyze, design and debug its related
algorithms and program modules. The most important task is to
train students’ innovation and practical application ability.
It is hard to teach operating systems because, in this field,
theory and practice mix probably more than in any other field.
However, considering operating systems now, most concepts in
the field are of interest only if they make the resulting system
perform well. This means that practice is so related to theory
that students are not likely to understand theory unless exposed
to a real system. So, MOS (Mini Operating System) is provided.
978-0-7695-3987-4/10 $26.00 © 2010 IEEE 405
DOI 10.1109/ETCS.2010.184
Students can analyze, modify and extend the functions of MOS
to train their system programming ability and make them
further understand the principles and the process of the co-
working of computer software and hardware.
This article is organized as follows. The teaching practice
of operating systems is analyzed in the second section. The
construction of the practical teaching system is given in the
third section. Conclusions are presented in the last section.
II. ANALYSIS OF OPERATING SYSTEMS OF TEACHING
PRACTICE.
At present, there are more than 400 textbooks that are
related to operating systems through the professional system
inquiry, including more than 150 textbooks of operating
systems. We found that most of the textbooks focus on the
theory and concepts of operating systems after detailed
analysis of these textbooks. Even if the practical strong
textbooks are targeted at algorithms or programs of processor
and process management, memory management, I/O
management, file systems, and interrupt management. They are
lack of systematic and integrity. In addition to operating
systems with source code are very large, such as Linux kernel
has hundreds of thousands or even millions of lines of source
code, Minix exceeds two million lines of source code. While
reading a mass of source code for an undergraduate is very
difficult. on the other hand, these systems have implemented
all functions of operating systems, students can only make use
of the system calls or APIs that are provided by the operating
system to create and destroy a process, to achieve interprocess
synchronization and mutual exclusion, memory allocation and
free, and file management, and so on. Students as an observer's
identity can only feel and experience of operating system
features and functions. They cannot design and code the
operating systems by themselves. This is not good to the
practical teaching of operating systems. In view of this,
improving the practical teaching of operating systems is
imminent. In this article, we has explored the practical teaching
of operating systems course to construct a practical platform
where students can design a multi-tasking MOS operating
system and write its code by themselves. Let students attain
specific operating system works and systems development
process. Students can learn operating system theory and
systems development steps through the do-it–themselves
practice.
 III. CONSTRUCTION OF PRACTICAL TEACHING SYSTEM
Practice teaching is a systems integration process, it is
necessary to have an adequate knowledge of basic theory as a
prerequisite, but also a reasonable arrangements for teaching
contents and teaching system design.
A. Established Courses System
A good development environment is the precondition of
the practical teaching. At least, students should be able to see
how a decent system works, how to use it, and how to extend it.
To fix this problem, we have introduced MOS as the operating
system of choice for the practical teaching.
Students must master Assembly Language based Intel
80x86 CPU of real-mode, C Programming, Data Structure, etc,
before the practical teaching of operating systems. These
courses enable students to systematically understand the basic
programming methods, ideas, and algorithms. On this basis,
students learn Principles of Computer Organization,
Microcomputer Principle and Interface Technology based on
Intel 80x86 CPU, Operating System. Students with the
knowledge of the above have the ability to prepare do-it-
themselves Mini Operating System.
B. The Establishment of the Practice Environment.
We have established the following development
environment:
x Software environment. Development platform with
supporting for 80x86 16-bit real-mode compiler
(Borland C++ 4.5); Virtual machine tool: Bochs V2.1
or above that simulates a computer; Disk image file
tools: WinImage that will write the programs or files to
the floppy disk or an image file; WriteBoot that writes
bootstrap to the boot sector of a floppy disk or an
image file; Assembly language compiler: NASM, it
will translate assembly language statements into the
target computer's machine code; Operating system:
Windows 98 or above.
x Hardware environment: the system is very small, a
1.44-MB 3.5-inch floppy disk can hold all program.
We can say that there is little computer hardware
requirements, but considering the system code
development platform is to use the Visual
programming tools(Borland C++ 4.5), so the hardware
is a PC that can install Windows 98 at least.
C. Design Practice Projects
In order to make the practice teaching system to have rules
to follow, We have established the hierarchy of MOS frame
according to the contents of teaching and provided the
development guidance for teachers and students. In order to
reduce the complexity of the system, the system directly calls
a variety of input and output functions which provided by
ROM-BIOS, which can achieve keyboard input, display output,
read/write disks and other operations. The concrete practice
modules are as follows:
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1) MOS hierarchy structure : The practice of MOS system
development using hierarchical modular structure is shown in
Fig. 1. MOS-IOS (MOS Input/Output system) layer is
dependent on the PC ROM-BIOS, which provides basic
input/output functions, such as: read/write disk, read/write file
allocation table FAT, query the file cluster number. On top of
the MOS-IOS is a variety of MOS management modules,
including process control, semaphore management, clock
management, memory management, file system, and I/O
management. Applications use these functions provided by
these managers through system call interface. MOS command
handler provides the interface for the user operating computer.
Application
MOS command handler
MOS system call interface
process Semaphore Clock Memory File I/O
Manager Manager Manager Manager Manager Manager
MOS-IOS
Figure 1. MOS hierarchical structure
2) Memory layout: MOS can manage the memory size of
1MB in the Intel 80x86 CPU real-mode, Fig 2 is its memory
layout. The entire memory space is divided into three parts, the
first part of the system space from 0x00000 to 0x31fff a total of
200KB; second part is the user space from 0x32000 to 0x9ffff
a total 440KB; third part of the PC, reserved space, from
0xa0000 to 0xfffff a total of 384KB.
0xfffff
PC reserved (384KB)
0xa0000
User space (440KB)
0x32000
System space(200KB)
0x00000
Figure 2. MOS memory layout
3) Implementation of process management: Process is the
most central concept in any operating system. Everything else
hinges on this concept, and it is important that the operating
system designer ( and students) have a thorough understanding
of what a process is as early as possible. Implementation of
process manager is a key part of the practice, but also the
traditional teaching of one of the most difficult to grasp.
Students develop an operating system that is no longer on top
of the existing operating system through the system calls to
achieve the control of the process, but according to actual
needs in themselves MOS to design creating, destroying and
managing process. It will not only stimulate the students
interest in learning, but also to avoid obscure teaching
effectively, to enhance the student hands-on capacity, to master
operating system concept. The concrete practice steps are as
follows:
a) Processes control
Scheduling policy of MOS is Priority based preemptive
real-time kernel. The process of MOS has three states, they are
ready, running and blocked. The transition of each process
among the states shows in Fig 3. When a process obtains the
processor, its state is the running. A process waiting for
processor in the ready queue is the ready state. A running
process becomes the blocked state because waiting an event
occur. There are three system calls to implement processes
Running
Wait an event
dispatch
Preempted
Ready Blocked
An event occurs
Figure 3. MOS states transition diagram
control in MOS system.
x Create a process: SysCreateProc. In order to simplify
the process of management, all of the processes are
equitable in status except the priority, while a process
creates a new process, the process and the created
process have the same status. The main task of
SysCreateProc is to apply for a stack, an idle process
control block PCB for a new process, and to initialize
the stack and fill out the PCB information, and then to
insert the PCB into the ready list by the priority to wait
for the process scheduler to select.
x Destroy a process: SysDelProc. A process at the
running state can be deleted by itself.
x Dalay a process: SysTimeDly. A process at the running
state can be delayed Several clocks. The clock interrupt
handler wakes up it when the delay time go over.
b) Scheduler
As MOS uses priority scheduling algorithm, the processes
in the ready list are row by priority. The first process in the
ready list is the highest priority, its state is running. We can set
up two global variables in MOS, one is MOSPCBCur, it is the
process that is running on the processor; one is MOSRDLPCB,
it is the first process of the ready list. Normally the value of
two variables is equal, if not equal, indicating a change in the
ready list, or a higher priority process into the ready list, or the
current running process left the ready list due to blocked. at this
time, the scheduler will select a new ready process to run.
c) Semaphore management
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Use the semaphore can implement process synchronization
and mutual exclusion to ensure the correctness of the system
resource scheduling. The MOS provides a four system calls
associated with the semaphore:
x Create a semaphore: SysCreateSem. This system call
creates a semaphore object, and assigns the initial
value to the semapore, it returns the semaphore object
identifier.
x Delete a semaphore: SysDelSem. It deletes the
specified semaphore.
x P operation: P. The P operation decrements the
semaphore value. If the value becomes negative, then
the process executing the P is blocked. Otherwise, the
process continues execution.
x V operation: V. The V operation increments the
semaphore value. If the value is less than or equal to
zero, then the process executing V operation wakes up
a process that is blocked by a P operation.
d) MOS command handler
Command handler mainly accepts user's keyboard input
commands. if students write a command handler, they can
further understand the process of the operating system handling
a command.
At system startup, MOS command handler creates an IDLE
system process that has the lowest priority and is responsible
for receiving user keyboard input, and executes the appropriate
command. Command is divided into internal command and
external command, there is only one internal command: dir that
displays the disk directory, external commands are stored as
files on disk, the executable file is a .EXE format file. When
the IDLE receives an external command, it looks up the
external command in the disk, and then moves it to the memory,
creates a new process, and then let it run. As long as one user
processes exists, the IDLE is in circular wait until the user
process to end. Once the system does not have a user process,
IDLE again receives keyboard commands.
e) Memory management
Memory is an important resource that must be carefully
managed. This practice will manage 64KB space that begins at
0x22000. MOS can use dynamic partitioning technique to
allocate memory, it will provide two system calls, they are
SysMemAllocate and SysMemFree. SysMemAllocate allocates
memory, SysMemFree frees memory.
f) File managment
File system is a method for storing and organizing
computer files and the data they contain to make it easy to find
and access them. MOS will provide the system calls to create
file, open file, read, write and close file.
g) I/O management
The device management involves numerous external
devices. Because a variety of devices for their management is
very complex, serial communications as an example of this
practice in order to design MOS's I/O management system,
providing four serial communication system calls. They are:
 x Open the serial communications device: SysOpenIO.
The system call initializes the serial-port COM1 and
COM2, and allow the 8259A response interrupt from
them. Initialization settings of COM1 and COM2 are
the transport bit 8 bits, stop bits 1 bit, no parity, the
baud rate 19200bps.
x Write the serial port˖ SysWriteIO. The first writes
information to the output buffer; Secondly, to allow
serial port to send the interrupt signal request generated.
x Read serial port: SysReadIO. The system call reads a
character from the input buffer and returns, if the input
buffer is empty, it returns the 0xFF.
x Close the serial port: SysCloseIO. The system call is
very simple, it clears the interrupt of the serial port.
h) user interface management
To simplify the MOS system, The MOS only provides 18
system calls, their entry is the interrupt vector 0x80. We only
set the function number and input parameters to the specified
registers, then call INT 0x80 instruction to implement the
function of the system call. Using system calls to design multi-
tasking programs, memory allocation programs, and file
system can help students further understand the principles of
operating systems.
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IV. CONCLUSIONS
We provide the source code of MOS system, its source
code is very small, about 2000 lines. The students may modify
and extend the function of MOS. The practical teaching of the
operating system mentioned in this article is applied to real
teaching environment, have gotten good result in teaching, and
greatly enhances the effect of teaching. A good reference
model is provided by the practical teaching of operating
systems. Practices prove that through system programming,
students have deep understanding of the management
mechanism of operating systems and their programming ability
is improved a lot.
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