How to teach OS

[Matthew Dillon]

    Teaching operating systems is not an easy task.  To do it right at the
    very least would require it to be a graduate level course and require
    that the students already know C.  And even then only a small percentage
    of the class would have the right combination of abilities to both
    appreciate the course and excel in it (and half of them would probably
    be self-taught undergrads).

    It should be possible to put a fun course together.  I would make it
    a combination of sysop-level work and low level programming work.  In
    order to teach various aspects of how the OS works you would want 
    course material that runs the gamut, from writing simple user level
    applications or shell scripts which exercise (and blow away) various
    aspects of the operating system's cache subsystem, to modifying system
    parameters to see their effects, to making actual changes to the kernel
    code.  It could certainly be made fun, but it isn't for everyone.

					-Matt
					Matthew Dillon 
					<dillon at xxxxxxxxxxxxx>