Does studying toy operating systems teach strictly more, or just different skills, than studying bare-metal embedded frameworks like https://github.com/rsta2/circle (which powers https://github.com/dwhinham/mt32-pi, unlike Zynthian which is Linux-based (https://zynthian.org/#software))? I dropped out of uni before completing my OS course, and I planned to look into mt32-pi, but sadly struggled with hardware and software setup (game MIDIs wouldn't play right, and in terms of sound design, all the good MT-32 patch editors are for obsolete platforms and many are gone from the Internet).
MIT 6.S081 – Operating System Engineering
11–20 of 51 posts
Re: MIT 6.S081 – Operating System Engineering
#12Are all the assignments self-graded or do we have to be enrolled at MIT to submit somewhere and see if our code is correct?
Re: MIT 6.S081 – Operating System Engineering
#13Does studying toy operating systems teach strictly more, or just different skills, than studying bare-metal embedded frameworks like https://github.com/rsta2/circle (which powers https://github.com/dwhinham/mt32-pi , unlike Zynthian which is Linux-based ( https://zynthian.org/#software ))? I dropped out of uni before completing my OS course, and I planned to look into mt32-pi, but sadly struggled with hardware and so…
I took an operating systems course at Purdue in which we built the Xinu OS from (almost) scratch [1]. Almost all of us had no real experience with a _big_ project like this before, and the most important thing thing that I learned was how to be comfortable with a large system of different moving parts that all need to interop together. I learned a lot about how processes work, C memory management, and shells, but I don't ever use that in my day to day. It is fun to know kind of what is going on way behind the scenes when I'm using my computer, but knowing the low level datastructures really hasn't been practical for me while the big picture of the project impacted me greatly.
Re: MIT 6.S081 – Operating System Engineering
#14OSTEP by Remzi and Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau is a great read for anybody interested in operating systems (https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/). The projects in their class at the University of Wisconsin-Madison were mainly making edits to the xv6 OS.
Re: MIT 6.S081 – Operating System Engineering
#15Are all the assignments self-graded or do we have to be enrolled at MIT to submit somewhere and see if our code is correct?
Looks like the labs include a makefile with a "grade" target so you can run "make grade" and it will tell you if you pass.
Re: MIT 6.S081 – Operating System Engineering
#16Does studying toy operating systems teach strictly more, or just different skills, than studying bare-metal embedded frameworks like https://github.com/rsta2/circle (which powers https://github.com/dwhinham/mt32-pi , unlike Zynthian which is Linux-based ( https://zynthian.org/#software ))? I dropped out of uni before completing my OS course, and I planned to look into mt32-pi, but sadly struggled with hardware and so…
Though implementations differ, for any nontrivial task the problem of scheduling and resource allocation is a recurring theme and an important part of what an OS class “teaches”. But for many undergraduates an OS is also their first large project, perhaps one written in C. Really, there’s no “one” skill that a toy OS can offer, but anything in the area will give you a greater appreciation for how OSes in general might work and the problems they need to solve.
Re: MIT 6.S081 – Operating System Engineering
#17The best universities in the world make their courses available online for free - what a time to be alive! I wonder if it's still possible to make money selling online courses in CS.
Re: MIT 6.S081 – Operating System Engineering
#18Good course.. thank god its open access
No, thank MIT... and consider donating.
Re: MIT 6.S081 – Operating System Engineering
#19Good course.. thank god its open access
No, thank MIT... and consider donating.
The MIT endowment made $9 billion in profit last year, they don't need your $5 to keep releasing their course materials. It's basically marketing anyway.
https://news.mit.edu/2021/mit-put-unexpected-gains-work-imme...
Re: MIT 6.S081 – Operating System Engineering
#20The best universities in the world make their courses available online for free - what a time to be alive! I wonder if it's still possible to make money selling online courses in CS.
Lots of scammy-looking FANG Algo/Career sites sell subscriptions and seem fairly lucrative, and then you have Udacity/Coursera/Edx that sell you a certificate if you want one. Personally I quite like Udemy because they’re cheap and very specific - a lot are junk but some are really good (like the Stephan Girder series on JavaScript and docker).