Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design Edition 3 By George Coulouris, Jean Dollimore and Tim Kindberg Addison-Wesley, ©Pearson Education 2001

Presentation points for Chapter 18:
MACH CASE STUDY

Objectives

To give the student insight into the design of operating system support for distributed systems through the case study of the Mach kernel.

Points to emphasize

Mach may be `old' but it spearheaded a wave of interest in operating systems that has fed directly into modern kernel designs.

Nonetheless, students should be encouraged to assess Mach critically, and compare it with the systems with which they are familiar.

Possible difficulties

We assume that students are familiar with some UNIX system calls, such as fork().

Students need a thorough understanding of the basic operation of paged MMUs, and of the concept of virtual memory.

Teaching hints

Review the material in Chapter 6, and relate the topics here to that material.

Although the Mach case study may be covered in isolation, it is instructive to cover at least two kernel case studies and compare them (there is material on Chorus and other kernels at www.cdk3.net).

Appeal to the students' knowledge of UNIX (or another OS).