Teaching Operating Systems with FreeBSD through Tracing, Analysis, and Experimentation

Many people who study computer science at universities encounter their first truly large system when studying operating systems. Until their first OS course, their projects are small, self-contained, and often written by only one person or a team of three or four. In this article, we suggest an approach to studying operating systems we have been using with graduate students and practitioners that involves using a small ARMv7 board and tracing. All of our materials are available online, with a BSD-like license.