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Do students at MIT actually write an OS or do they just do bedtime source code reading?

I was wondering the same thing. At Emory we were handed a few M68K assembly routines but hand to crank out the rest of the OS ourselves.

It looks like MIT does something similar. They study xv6 but have to implement an OS with different specifications. See http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2011/overview.html