- Opaak
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The Opaak educational trilogy aims at providing material for the teaching and self-teaching of operating system concepts ranging from low-level programming, to kernel internals to operating system principles and distributed system paradigms.
Contents
Projects
Opaak is composed of the three following projects
kastor
kastor, originally named k, is an introductory project targeting low-level programming. The project lasts several weeks and allows students to understand what is the microprocessor's role in an operating system though many modern functionalities are not discussed in this project such as virtual memory and scheduling.
The objective for students is to develop an emulator for arcade games such as Pong, Arcanoid etc. Indeed, the kastor monolithic kernel is provided with an ELF binary at the boot time which represents an arcade game to be run. The kernel extracts this game from a special and minimalistic file system, loads it into memory and finally executes it.
kaneton
kaneton represents the core of the Opaak trilogy as it aims at making students develop parts of a microkernel. This project is taught following the kastor project and lasts for a few months. The project is composed of several stages, each one targeting a kernel functionality such as the booting phase, the interrupts processing, the memory management and the multitasking.
This project focuses on making students fully understand the kernel internals of a microkernel-based operating system by addressing advanced concepts such as multiprocessing, security etc.
kayou
kayou is an operating system built over the kaneton microkernel. The kayou's originality resides in its fully distributed architecture. Indeed, in an environment composed of multiple kayou instances, all the computers of the network share their resources with each other including memory, processor, storage, devices etc.
History
The Opaak educational trilogy's projects have been used for teaching operating systems at EPITA since 2004, date at which the kastor project was created. The Opaak trilogy has been introduced by Julien Quintard in 2007 following the relative success of the kastor and kaneton projects in the EPITA curriculum.
In 2006, the kaneton educational project competed[1] in the Alternative OS Contest run by the specialized website OSNews.
See also
References
- ^ The kaneton Microkernel Project at the Alternative OS Contest
External links
Categories:- Distributed computing architecture
- Microkernels
- Operating system technology
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