A project for operating systems simulation

摘要

The purpose of this paper is to describe a project in a course on Operating Systems. The project is designed to reinforce the concepts of memory management, process management and processor management that are discussed in most Operating Systems texts. Each student is to design and write a program that will simulate these major components of an operating system. This project is presented to the student in 3 phases and is written in Pascal although it can be adapted to other languages. The first phase requires the design of memory management routines for an operating system which schedules jobs through the use of a combined round robin/FIFO philosophy. The major concerns are the allocation and deallocation of memory pages as programs are submitted to the system and are removed from the system as they finish. The second phase takes into account various scheduling techniques, I/O requests, and swapping. Having already worked out the bugs in the memory management routines, the student now must be concerned with the management of the jobs that pass through the system. The third and last phase is the implementation of job synchronization. Several events are described, any of which may be the object of a WAIT or SIGNAL directive issued by an executing program. The project must synchronize jobs that issue a WAIT and SIGNAL directive on the same event.

The project is part of a 3 credit course in Operating Systems taught to Juniors and Seniors. Successful completion of the project includes not only the correct implementation of a well documented and logically designed operating system, but also a comparative study, within each phase, of the efficiency and effectiveness of the operating system as a variety of parameters, which describe the environment, are changed. Observations are submitted in a report that is required with each phase.