Teaching Operating Systems: The Windows Case

摘要

An operating system (OS) is a program that manages computer hardware. And although today's commercial-off-the-shelf desktop operating systems appear to be an integral part of PCs and workstation to many users, a fundamental understanding of the algorithms, principles, heuristics, and optimizations used is crucial for creating efficient application software. Furthermore, many of the principles in OS courses are relevant to large system applications like databases and web servers. Within this paper, we present our approach towards teaching OS concepts based on the Windows family of operating systems. In contrast to many stable Unix-based curricula, a Windows-based OS curriculum has to take into account the OS as a moving target. And although Windows source code has been made available to academic institutions, managing complexity is among the biggest challenges when teaching OS concepts based on Windows. Teaching experiences reported within this paper have lead to development of the "Curriculum Resource Kit (CRK)", an entire Windows-based OS curriculum that is freely available for download