A down-to-earth educational operating system for up-in-the-cloud many-core architectures

Abstract

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 intercore message passing communication to a well-established OS curriculum.

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Index Terms

• Software and its engineering

  • Software creation and management

    • Designing software

  • Software organization and properties

    • Contextual software domains

      • Operating systems

        • Communications management