pintos

PintOS is a simple educational OS framework for the 80x86 architecture, originally developed at Stanford as a teaching tool for operating systems courses. The project involved implementing several core OS components including thread scheduling, process management, system calls, and file system operations.

PintOS is one of the most educational C projects I've done. I found scheduling to be the most interesting part, as well as the part I had the most fun writing. Not only did it help me become a better C programmer, its primary value was in how it deepened my understanding of operating system concepts. Writing a scheduler from scratch (including priority scheduling and aging) made OS concepts click in a way that lecture alone doesn't. Some key takeaways:

• Thread scheduling, priority, round-robin, and aging
• Synchronization, locks, semaphores, condition variables
• System call implementation and user/kernel space separation
• File system design and disk block management