Web site: people.ee.ethz.ch/~topsy/index.html (not active)
Origin: Switzerland
Category: Education
Desktop environment: CLI
Architecture: MIPS
Based on: Independent
Wikipedia:
Media: Install
The last version | Released: unknown
Topsy (Teachable OPerating SYstem) – a small operating system which has been designed for teaching purposes.
It constitutes the framework for the practical exercises related to the course Computer Engineering II. This course is taught at the Department of Electrical Engineering at ETH Zürich and deals with the basic concepts of operating systems.
Features:
– Simplicity: Powerful kernels tend to be too large and over-featured. Many algorithms are tuned for speed, lacking a simple formulation. Also, many unnecessary modules are found in kernels for performance reasons.
– Readability: OS code is often obscured due to its historical origin and lots of options and hardware variants being supported.
– Hardware independence: While most systems claim to be portable, we found that the effort of porting a complex existing system is comparable to building a new simple one.
– Transparency: For didactic reasons we favor clear program code instead of efficient realizations. The basic principles implemented in an OS have to be easily comprehensible by the students. Most OSs are designed for efficiency.
– Lecture compatibility: Since this is a course for students in the second academic year, we have to take into account what they have learned so far. One implication is the use of the C programming language because it was introduced in the lecture Computer Engineering I.
The main goal was to design a small, easy to understand, well structured, but also realistic system.
The focal point was explicitly on didactic interests. This report describes the design and implementation of Topsy. Design principles, algorithms, and data structures found in many other operating systems like Unix, Minix, Oberon, or Mach, only to name a few, were incorporated in Topsy.
Source: www.rose-hulman.edu/Class/se/csse490/cs490-csa/project/os/Topsy_1.1.pdf
