1. An Operating Systems Course Integrated With WAP Tools: First Experiences Ahmet KOLTUKSUZ, Ph.D., Serap ATAY, Ph.D. {ahmetkoltuksuz, serapatay@iyte.edu.tr} Izmir Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comp. Eng. Izmir, Turkey

2. Agenda Course history Enter WAP WAP workshop in Izmir Institute of Technology Contents – Attendees – Microsoft side What is this WAP anyway Implementing WAP with curriculum Course schedule – books for the class & for the lab – grading & the performance Findings

3. Course History –An Operating Systems course, coded as CENG312 for juniors, had been taught with “Windows APIs” and multi-threaded applications and IPC implementations in accordance with the books by Silbershatz, A., Galvin, P.A., Gagne, G.; “Operating System Concepts”, and by Nutt, G., “Operating System Projects Using Windows NT” for the past three years in Izmir Institute of Technology.

4. WAP Workshop – a small history... –Early in February 2007, Microsoft Turkey provided WAP for the first time for us to discover the new opportunity. –Did meet Dr. Retik and Dr. Probert in Microsoft MEA Academic Days 2007,Tunisia. –After attending to their WAP workshop, decided to have one in Turkey too. –Then held a workshop on WAP in our department on September 15 th & 16 th of 2007 with great contributions of Dr. Retik and Dr. Probert of whom both from Microsoft, Redmond, USA.

5. Workshop on WAP, Windows Kernel Source and Internals: Sept. 15-16 2007, İzmir Institute of Technology, Turkey. Workshop description: Windows Academic Program Workshop provides information and practical hands-on knowledge of the content, access to the Windows kernel source code, curriculum materials and a project environment for teaching and researching operating system principles. Instructors are Dave Probert (Kernel Architect, Windows Core Operating Systems Division, Redmond) and Arkady Retik (Windows Academic Program Manager, Source Asset Management, Redmond)

6. Workshop on WAP, Windows Kernel Source and Internals: Sept. 15-16 2007, İzmir Institute of Technology, Turkey Workshop objectives: Introduce faculty members to the Windows Academic Program (WAP) materials, Provide rudimentary hands-on experience accessing the Curriculum Resource Kit (CRK), building the Windows Research Kernel (WRK), and ProjectOZ, and Share ideas on how to successfully use these for lectures and projects/labs. Content/Areas covered: Windows Kernel Internals overview Use of the Curriculum Resource Kit (CRK) and other resources to build/augment OS curriculum Compiling and running the Windows Research Kernel (WRK) on VirtualPC. Hands-on project: ProjectOZ overview

7. Workshop Agenda

8. Workshop on WAP, Windows Kernel Source and Internals: Sept. 15- 16 2007, İzmir Institute of Technology, Turkey The attendees –The professors, instructors & TAs of the course of Operating Systems from Dokuz Eylul University, Ege University, Izmir University of Economics, Yasar University, Bilkent University and, from Izmir Institute of Technology reaching to a total number of 26 academics.

9. Workshop on WAP, Windows Kernel Source and Internals: Sept. 15-16 2007, İzmir Institute of Technology, Turkey. –We hereby -again- extend our appreciations and thanks to  Dr. Dave PROBERT, Kernel Architect, Windows Core Operating Systems Division, Redmond.  Dr. Arkady RETIK, Windows Academic Program Manager, Source Asset Management, Redmond.  Eminay YURTSEVEN, Audience Marketing Manager, Developer & Platform, İstanbul, Turkey.  Dr. Cemal AKYEL, Developer & Platform Director, Ankara, Turkey.

10. Computer Engineering Courses Course of Operating Systems CRK: Curriculum Resource Kit better operating systems education WAP: Windows Academic Program Instruction WRK: Windows Research Kernel Research Application Project OZ

11. Computer Engineering Courses Course of Operating Systems CRK: Curriculum Resource Kit better operating systems education WAP: Windows Academic Program Instruction Research Application Windows Operating System Internals, Curriculum Resource Kit (CRK): Presentation slides, experiments, labs, quizzes and assignments for introducing case studies from the Windows kernel into operating system courses.

12. Computer Engineering Courses Course of Operating Systems better operating systems education WAP: Windows Academic Program Instruction WRK: Windows Research Kernel Research Application Windows Research Kernel (WRK): The core kernel sources and binaries integrated with an environment for building and testing experimental versions of the Windows kernel for use in teaching and research.

13. Computer Engineering Courses Course of Operating Systems better operating systems education WAP: Windows Academic Program Instruction Research Application Project OZ ProjectOZ An operating systems project environment that uses the native kernel interfaces of Windows to provide simple, clean, user-mode abstractions of the CPU, MMU, trap mechanism, and physical memory that can be used to perform experiments in operating systems principles.

14. After the WAP workshop –Decided to utilize these WAP tools in our undergrad course “Ceng313- Operating Systems” in a more efficient way. –Thus, upgraded the course curriculum with the WAP tools and decided to utilize the materials in the directory “Curriculum Resource Kit Units” and to use the book named “Microsoft Windows Internals, 4th Edition, Microsoft Press, 2004” by Russinovich & Solomon.

15. Implementation –2007-2008 Academic year –Fall term –Ceng 312 Operating Systems – A must course for all fresmen

16. The Course Schedule

17. The course books –Silbershatz, A., Galvin, P.A., Gagne, G.; Operating System Concepts, 6th Ed., John Wiley & Sons, USA, 2001. –Russinovich, M. E., Solomon, D.A.; Microsoft Windows Internals, 4th Edition, Microsoft Press, 2004. –Nutt, G.J.; Operating Systems A Modern Perspective, 2nd Ed., Addison Wesley, 2000.

18. Lab books & other references –Nutt, G.J.; Operating System Projects Using Windows NT, Department of Computer Science University of Colorado, 1999. –http://www.sysinternals.com :Tools used in labs and experimentshttp://www.sysinternals.com –http://msdn.microsoft.com: Online resource for information on APIs required during work on assignments.http://msdn.microsoft.com

19. Grading –This semester the course was taken by 58 juniors for fourteen weeks of both course and lab. The grading was done as below: [ 20% of midterm + 30% of final exam + 50% of the average of the lab assignments & a lab exam ]

20. The overall performance –12 juniors were unsuccessful out of 58 and they are to repeat the course. So the overall success of the course is 79%. –The distribution of the grades for the whole class

21. Our findings 1.Generally our students were far more attracted to the course and its labs this year which clearly shows that they did easily grasp the concepts of the course and thus they enjoyed implementing the exercises and assignments in the laboratory that all conducted under WAP. At the end of the year, the course was scrutinized by us and by our students in one last session and we found out that our students were a lot more happier since they were able to create and to implement OS codes easily.

22. Our findings (continued) 2.The freshmen did have some difficulties with the book “Microsoft Windows Internals, 4th Edition” for the book actually requires a prerequisite knowledge of OS theory. For that reason we feel that it is more suitable as a secondary book for the course along with the other classical books on the subject. However, this peculiarity makes the book perfect for grad level studies. So we recommend that the book be utilized as a secondary for undergrads while can be first for grad level studies and for code development projects.

23. Our findings (continued) 3.The system-internals tools are quite useful to understand and to monitor the objects and to clarify some troublesome concepts of operating systems such as the difference between process and thread, performance monitoring, scheduling and of memory usage. Since these tools add a dimension of visualization to the hard-to-grasp theoretical concepts of OS we highly recommend it for the undergrad education.

24. Our findings (continued) 4.Unfortunately the time didn’t permit us to fully utilize “virtual PC” and “Project Oz” tools and thus they will be utilized in the next fall term. However; we feel that these tools are more appropriate for the miscellaneous code development projects and for the graduate level courses.

25. Thank you so much for your time!