Welcome to OS161 at UBC
OS/161 is the educational operating system developed at Harvard by David Holland. It was spearheaded by Margo Seltzer for use in her famous Harvard course on operating systems, CS161. Since then, OS/161 has been adopted for teaching in many universities around the world. Operating systems courses that use OS/161 are known to be gruelling, yet incredibly enriching and rewarding.
OS/161 s relatively easy to handle, compared to large real-world OS, and yet the codebase is similar enough to a real OS that after working with it, you will feel relatively at ease with a 'real-world' UNIX OS. It is BSD-like in feel and has more "reality" than most other teaching OSes; while it runs on a simulator it has the structure and design of a larger system.
Navigate the links above to find out more about OS/161 and how to use it. Click on the sitemap to get a list of all documentation available on this site.
Note that this guide has been adapted for use primarily by students taking the OS course in the ECE department at UBC, so the instructions often refer to ECE-specific resources. Nevertheless, even if you are not at UBC, you should be able to use this guide to install OS/161 in your environment.
This site is maintained by Sasha Fedorova, who also contributed a couple of code lines to OS/161. If you have questions or need to report an issue with this site, email her.