Not Another Completely Heuristic Operating System

Not Another Completely Heuristic Operating System, or Nachos, is instructional software for teaching undergraduate, and potentially graduate level operating systems courses. It was developed at the University of California, Berkeley, designed by Thomas Anderson, and is used by numerous schools.

Originally written in C++ for MIPS, Nachos runs as a user-process on a host operating system. A MIPS simulator executes the code for any user programs running on top of the Nachos operating system. Ports of the Nachos code exist for a variety of architectures.

In addition to the Nachos code, a number of assignments are provided with the Nachos system. The goal of Nachos is to introduce students to concepts in operating system design and implementation by requiring them to implement significant pieces of functionality within the Nachos system.

Nachos version 3.4 has been the stable, commonly used version of Nachos for many years. Nachos version 4.0 has existed as a beta since approximately 1996.

Successors

As Nachos has not been in active development for a number of years, and possesses a number of recognized flaws (particularly with regards to portability: Nachos relies on MIPS assembly code, and requires porting to run on x86 architecture), successor projects have been initiated. In 2004, Stanford University created Pintos, a Nachos-inspired system written in C and designed to run on actual x86 hardware. At UC Berkeley, Nachos was ported to the Java programming language as Nachos 5.0j, attempting to make Nachos more portable and accessible to undergraduates. At Technical University of Graz(Austria), a system called SWEB has been implemented, which is used in Operating Systems Lesson.

External links

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