The Hitchhiker's Guide to Operating Systems

Explore a principled approach to operating system teaching in this conference talk from USENIX ATC '23. Discover how state transition systems can be used as first-class citizens in OS education, and learn about an innovative methodology for conveying complex research systems to junior learners. Examine the design and implementation of a minimal operating system model featuring nine system calls that cover process-based isolation, thread-based concurrency, and crash consistency. Gain insights into the use of a model checker and interactive state space explorer for comprehensive examination of all possible system behaviors. Enhance your understanding of effective OS teaching techniques and their practical applications in this 18-minute presentation by Yanyan Jiang from Nanjing University.