Project Babylon

Project Babylon is an ambitious, student-led effort to redesign the operating systems course at UC Berkeley. We feel the current course spends too much time on esoteric topics and presents operating systems in an unrealistic light. Students are best served by working on a toy operating system which is similar to, but simpler than, a real operating system.

Our toy operating system is written in C99, a modern dialect of C, the implementation language for most modern operating systems. The current teaching operating system, NACHOS, was written in C++ and rewritten in Java. We are opposed to using Java for a teaching operating system because it hides the issue of memory management, a topic crucial to understanding the design decisions made in a real operating system.

NACHOS also suffers from a terribly inaccurate simulator because it runs as a Unix process and uses a MIPS simulator only for user land processes, our toy operating system runs on VMIPS, a realistic MIPS R3000 simulator. This realism helps students gain a more complete understanding of how modern operating systems work because they can see how an operating system executes on real hardware. No important implementation details are swept under the rug.

If you would like to become involved in the effort please email babylon@csua.berkeley.edu and look at the Getting Started page.

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