Java in Operating Systems Courses

This is a list of resources for using the Java programming language in courses on operating systems principles. There are four main approaches I know of to using Java in such a course:

• Use Java to teach the principles of concurrent programming, not in particularly operating-systems related context.
• Use Java to write individual operating system components. For example, it is possible to write a file system in Java.
• Use Java to write a simulator for a full operating system, including the machine it is running on.
• Use Java to write programs that make non-trivial use of operating-system services (such as network communication) in order to teach more about those services.

Given this variety of options, I expect the below list of resources to grow; please send me email if you have something I could add.

Enough preliminaries, here are the resources I know of so far:

• The JNode project is an open-source effort to develop a Java operating system.
• Jeff Magee and Jeff Kramer of Imperial College have a supporting web site, Concurrency: State Models & Java Programs, for their book of the same title.
• David Jones of Central Queensland University has a team working on RCOS.java, a simulated operating system (including underlying machine), implemented as a Java applet. A preliminary version is already available.
• Steve Hartley of Drexel University has a collection of example concurrent programs written in Java which are to form the basis of a book. These would be suitable for the concurrent programming portion of an operating systems course, as well as for a course specifically on concurrent programming.
• Marvin Solomon of the University of Wisconsin - Madison has a whole introductory operating systems course set up to use Java, including projects on synchronization, CPU scheduling, disk scheduling, and a file system.
• I (Max Hailperin) have a couple Java-based concurrent programming exercises that I've used in my operating systems course:
  • A networked multi-player puzzle program in which the client and server programs both are multi-threaded, and both have race bugs in them. The assignment is to find the races, demonstrate their existence by insertion of time delays and otherwise making the conditions right, and then fixing them by inserting appropriate ``synchronized'' keywords (and demonstrating that they are gone).
  • An implementation of the ``readers/writers'' locking mechanism, together with a GUI demo of it, that is subject to starvation of a writer by a stream of overlapping readers. The assignment is to make it starvation free (without wrecking the basic exclusion property). (Note that this is akin to one of Hartley's example programs. This isn't surprising given how classic this example is.) (Only problem 2 of this homework is the Java readers/writers part, problem 1 is unrelated.)
• Assaf Schuster of Technion - Israel Institute of Technology has a tutorial on concurrent programming in Java.
• George Fankhauser of the ETH Zürich has a MIPS simulator written in Java that he uses for running an instructional micro-kernel OS on. However, the OS itself has no Java content.