An Experimental Nexos Laboratory Using Virtual Xinu

The Nexos Project is a joint effort between Marquette University, the University of Buffalo, and the University of Mississippi to build curriculum materials and a supporting experimental laboratory for hands-on projects in computer systems courses. The approach focuses on inexpensive, flexible, commodity embedded hardware, freely available development and debugging tools, and a fresh implementation of a classic operating system, Embedded Xinu, that is ideal for student exploration. This paper describes an extension to the Nexos laboratory that includes a new target platform composed of Qemu virtual machines. Virtual Xinu addresses two challenges that limit the effectiveness of Nexos. First, potential faculty adopters have clearly indicated that even with the current minimal monetary cost of installation, the hardware modifications, and time investment remain troublesome factors that scare off interested educators. Second, overcoming the inherent complications that arise due to the shared subnet that result in students\u27 projects interfering with each other in ways that are difficult to recreate, debug, and understand. Specifically, this paper discusses porting the Xinu operating systems to Qemu virtual hardware, developing the virtual networking platform, and results showing success using Virtual Xinu in the classroom during one semester of Operating Systems at the University of Mississippi

Porting the Embedded Xinu Operating System to the Raspberry Pi

This thesis presents a port of a lightweight instructional operating system called Embedded Xinu to the Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi, an inexpensive credit-card-sized computer, has attracted a large community of hobbyists, researchers, and educators since its release in 2012. However, the system-level software running on the Raspberry Pi has been restricted to two ends of a spectrum: complex modern operating systems such as Linux at one end, and very simple hobbyist operating systems or simple “bare-metal” programs at the other end. This project bridges this gap by porting the Embedded Xinu operating system to the Raspberry Pi. Although simple and designed for educational use, Embedded Xinu supports major features of modern operating systems such as preemptive multitasking and networking. This thesis also presents the addition of new optional features, such as USB support, to Embedded Xinu, and demonstrates major challenges that may arise when writing device drivers for modern hardware

Performance Analysis of Hardware Protection & System Security in Different Operating Systems

The intention of article is to protect the hardware, which includes protecting CPU, I/O, and memory. This article portrays and relates the security in different operating systems. Therefore, helping us to choose the best. We can evaluate the security in different operating systems like Windows, UNIX, Linux to secure over all data to access unauthorized users

A Success Story in Teaching Real World ICT to IS Students: A Case Study in using Portable Storage Devices

Teaching Information and Communications Technology (ICT) to Information Systems (IS) students has too often drawn its pedagogy from Computer Science Education. This paper illustrates by way of a case study a set of very successful techniques and a philosophy of, perhaps, an IS pedagogy. We show that it is possible to expose IS students to some quite rigorous educational experiences that are particularly well suited in preparing them for their future employment and their careers as IS professionals. This paper discusses the use of portable and removable hard disks as “virtual computers” and “virtual servers”, as an aide in the pursuit of providing practice of the ICT theory

State of the art survey of network operating systems development

The results of the State-of-the-Art Survey of Network Operating Systems (NOS) performed for Goddard Space Flight Center are presented. NOS functional characteristics are presented in terms of user communication data migration, job migration, network control, and common functional categories. Products (current or future) as well as research and prototyping efforts are summarized. The NOS products which are revelant to the space station and its activities are evaluated

Parallel I/O system for a clustered computing environment

Master'sMASTER OF SCIENC

Design and implementation of a micro operating system over an ARM architecture processor. The practical case of the Raspberry Pi

As students, we are often propelled towards a high level programming throughout the four years of the computer science degree. Java for the highest language and C for the lowest language. However, all the languages were used atop an Operating System with the libraries that it comprises. It was very curious along these years to be able to deal with the hardware and get a better grasp of how Operating System really works under the hood. My choice was therefore to dedicate my bachelor thesis to design and implement my own educational Operating System. The goal of this Bachelor Thesis is to implement a mini-OS from the ground up avoiding as much as possible the use of external libraries. That way, we will go on to implement our own boot-loader, hardware initialization, standard I/O library, graphical library, etc. The device used for designing and implementing the operating system is the Raspberry Pi model B+, which CPU uses the ARM architecture. The reason for this choice was to use a cheap and convenient device for the task. The Raspberry Pi costs around 30e and boots from an SD card that can be easily placed and removed. The boot time is also virtually instantaneous, which comes very handy at the time of the implementation.Ingeniería Informátic

Internet based data collection and monitoring for wireless sensor networks

Thesis (M.S.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2007The omnipresence of the Internet and the advances in integrated circuit technologies has expanded the potential modes of communication and data collection. Adding Internet capabilities to any electronic device greatly extends the device's user interface, allowing the user to remotely configure and monitor the device over the network through the embedded web server. The embedded web server is expected to establish two-way communication and serve dynamic web pages using very limited resources. We adapted an existing embedded web server to allow remote control and monitoring of wireless sensor networks (WSN). This required establishing an interface to the WSN and developing firmware and user programs to communicate with the remote client. An interactive and flexible web-based user management interface is developed to allow the two-way interaction between the remote user and the wireless sensor network. The embedded server generates email alerts to the administrator about critical issues in the WSN, provides secure access to the WSN control modules, etc. Two embedded web servers are developed using different hardware platforms. The first solution is a low cost, energy efficient solution with somewhat limited functionality. The other uses a more powerful microcontroller-based platform and implements a fully-functional, dynamic web server with multiple web pages.1. Introduction -- 2. Embedded web server -- 3. Related studies -- 4. MSP430-based Web Server -- 5. Rabbit-based web server -- 6. Conclusion and future work -- 7. References -- Appendix A: TCP/IP protocol frame formats -- Appendix B: Embedded web server snapshots

An X-Windows monitoring system for SunOS MINIX

Most operating systems instructors recognise the value of practical work in their courses. Laboratory-style practical work offers the student the opportunity to put their theoretical knowledge into practice. The incorporation of laboratory work into an operating systems course requires the use of practical aids that illustrate or reinforce the important concepts of operating systems theory. The design and implementation of such an aid, the SunOS MINIX Monitoring System, is described. This system is based on SunOS MINIX, a version of the MINIX instructional operating system that runs as a user process under SunOS. The aim of this project was to take advantage of the hosted nature of SunOS MINIX by constructing a communications interface that would permit it to be monitored and controlled by external (SunOS) processes. The monitoring system includes a set of tools allowing a user to inspect, monitor and control a running instance of the SunOS MINIX operating system