Ideally, the most meaningful learning experience for students in an undergraduate OS course would be to develop fully-functional OS's on their own. This can be accomplished using μ mps, a hardware emulator for a pedagogically undergraduate-appropriate hardware architecture, along with Kaya, a specification for a multi-layer OS supporting multiprocessing, VM, thread synchronization, external devices (disks, terminals, tape, printers, and network interfaces) and a file system.Traditional OS projects like Nachos[3] or OS/161[9] provide students with a significant starting code base. Students then modify existing OS modules or add new ones. With μ mps/Kaya students undergo an innovative and pedagogically different experience of starting only with a hardware emulator (i.e. no initial OS code base for students to build on/replace) and ending with a completely student written OS capable of running student written C programs.

Lab activity is fundamental for the real understanding of several computer science topics such as operating systems. We have built our own hardware emulator after using software tools from other Universities for several years. MPS is a general-purpose computer system simulator based on MIPS R3000 processor. Together with the main processor, RAM, ROM, disks, tapes, printer and terminal interfaces are carefully emulated and fully configurable; non-volatile memory units may be retained between simulations.MPS features a full-fledged graphic user interface running under X Window, complete sources and documentation. Along with it we present TINA, an experimental project on operating system development, together with several other project proposals.