On Mon, Dec 20, 2010 at 03:01:32AM +1000, culchie wrote:
> Can you give any information as to why your college
> made this decision?
> TECS is such an efficient course it's hard to see how
> devoting the same amount of time could give a better
> return.
> Having said that I still haven't managed to get around to
> finishing it!
> Happy Christmas to you too
Thanks for the mail culchie.
TECS is great, don't get me wrong, but it's more of a capstone subject that
students should do after having seen a range of other material. TECS goes for
depth and active learning but at the expense of breadth of coverage.
For the subject that I'm teaching, we need 6 weeks of operating systems,
which TECS doesn't cover in enough detail. Other things which we need to
teach include:
- the CISC vs RISC distinction
- instruction set design and ISAs
- the various addressing modes
- user mode vs kernel mode
- interrupts, exceptions, syscalls, and handlers for them
- low-level memory management: pages etc.
- processes & process scheduling
- file systems
- memoy management: pages, paging, COW
- synchronisation and threads
So, having done this subject which cuts a broad swathe across both the
hardware and software sides of systems, students could then go on to do
TECS which covers some of the material but in more depth.
Cheers,
Warren
Locked
