[bmiranda]

I took the class (6.828) last semester at MIT, and the labs do a great job of handling a lot of the annoying x86 stuff so that you can focus on the more interesting parts of writing an OS.

I know this because for the final project my partner and I ported the OS to 64bit. Although the number of changes was not too large, we spent hours debugging low level x86_64 stuff. Although we learned a lot, I think it is a good idea the labs provide the boilerplate.