[anocendi]

As a fellow embedded developer who has read most of the materials, I will tell you this:

The operating systems class you took should have covered the core concepts in the papers.

In my opinion, most of the papers talk about how those core concepts came to be in the golden age of Operating Systems Research when it was booming in the same way AI/Machine Learning/Big Data is booming post 2000s. Read it at your leisure if you are interested in the backstory.

That said, the class is of teaching critical reading, critical thinking, presentation, proper discussion and critiquing of academic papers: just that the topic happens to be Operating Systems.