A Down-to-Earth Educational Operating System for Up-in-the-Cloud Many-Core Architectures

We present Xipx, the first port of a major educational operating system to a processor in the emerging class of many-core architectures. Through extensions to the proven Embedded Xinu operating system, Xipx gives students hands-on experience with system programming in a distributed message-passing environment. We expose the software primitives needed to maintain coherency between many cores in a system lacking specialized caching hardware. Our proposed series of laboratory assignments adds parallel thread execution and inter-core message passing communication to a well-established OS curriculum

XinuPi3: Teaching Multicore Concepts Using Embedded Xinu

As computer platforms become more advanced, the need to teach advanced computing concepts grows accordingly. This paper addresses one such need by presenting XinuPi3, a port of the lightweight instructional operating system Embedded Xinu to the Raspberry Pi 3. The Raspberry Pi 3 improves upon previous generations of inexpensive, credit card-sized computers by including a quad-core, ARM-based processor, opening the door for educators to demonstrate essential aspects of modern computing like inter-core communication and genuine concurrency. Embedded Xinu has proven to be an effective teaching tool for demonstrating low-level concepts on single-core platforms, and it is currently used to teach a range of systems courses at multiple universities. As of this writing, no other bare metal educational operating system supports multicore computing. XinuPi3 provides a suitable learning environment for beginners on genuinely concurrent hardware. This paper provides an overview of the key features of the XinuPi3 system, as well as the novel embedded system education experiences it makes possible