Content for Linux Operating Systems Class

Question

I will be TA for an operating systems class this upcoming semester. The labs will deal specifically with the Linux Kernel.

1. What concepts/components of the Linux kernel do you think are the most important to cover in the class?
2. What do you wish was covered in your studies that was left out?

Any suggestions regarding the Linux kernel or overall operating systems design would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

My list:

1. What an operating system's concerns are: Abstraction and extension of the physical machine and resource management.
2. How the build process works ie, how architecture specific/machine code stuff is implanted
3. How system calls work and how modules can link up
4. Memory management / Virtual Memory / Paging and all the rest
5. How processes are born, live and die in POSIX and other systems
6. userspace vs kernel threads and what the difference is between process/threads
7. Why the monolithic Kernel design is growing tiresome and what are the alternatives
8. Scheduling (and some of the alternative / domain specific schedulers)
9. I/O, Driver development and how they are dynamically loaded
10. The early stages of booting and what the kernel does to setup the environment
11. Problems with clocks, mmu-less systems etc
12. ... I could go on ...
13. I almost forgot IPC and Unix 'eveything is a file' design decisions
14. POSIX, why it exists, why it shouldn't

In the end just get them to go through tanenbaum's modern operating systems and also do case studies on some other kernels like Mach/Hurd's microkernel setup and maybe some distributed and exokernel stuff.

Give a broad view past Linux too, I recon

For those who are super geeky, the history of operating systems and why they are the way they are.