DOSP: Distributed Computing-Based Operating Systems Labs Platform

Operating Systems (OS), as a core course in Computer Science, is given much attention by all universities all over the world. Labs are the most important part of the course, and universities apply different solutions for it. Mainstream OS labs can be divided into two categories: Algorithm simulation-based labs are not beneficial for students to understand the actual mechanism of OS systematically; Kernel development-based labs have a higher barrier to entry and require more hardware resource, which is difficult for low-level universities to carry out. To solve the drawbacks of current labs solutions, this paper proposes a distributed computing-based OS labs platform, DOSP. In DOSP, students can perform labs in the virtualization-based pre-built environment, and get real-time feedback from the judging system; Teachers can check students' score overview and real-time teaching progress via the scoring system. The judging system can utilize idle resources in the PC room to perform distributed judging efficiently, to reduce the consumption of computing resources on the central server. Evaluation results show that our solution outperforms others in load capacity and scalability. As the result, it can solve many pain points in current OS lab teaching, which has good application prospects.