Thanks to MIT

MIT's Parallel and Distributed Operating System (PDOS) Group teaches an opearting sytems course, PDOS 6.1810. PDOS 6.1810 is a learn by doing course that uses their RISC-V Xv6 operating system running in QEMU. I encounted MIT's Xv6 several years ago, when I first taught Operating Systems at UMW. At the time, Xv6 was x86 based. Instead of using Xv6 and QEMU, my initial approach was to extract Xv6 code into standalone code that could be compiled and executed on Linux. For example, I packaged proc.c into a programming module where students implemented two schedulers: round-robin and Linux Completely Fair. I integrated these standalone Xv6 labs with lectures and problems derived from OS Three Easy Pieces. At one point, I found a version of Xv6 that booted onto a Raspberry Pi. I thought about integrating it as part of my course. I got it running, but getting it to run was tedious and I did not think using the Pi's Xv6 in class would be beneficial.

For the Fall 2024, I have decided to use the MIT RISC-V Xv6 that runs in QEMU as part of my course content. I am using the MIT PDOS 6.1810 web structure. I have modified the course content to better suit the UMW OS class and our students.