This special issue of JOS contains 12 papers selected from the IEEE International Workshop on Computer System Education and Innovation 2008 (IWCSEI’08). This workshop is sponsored by IEEE and Intel Corporation. The progress of the semiconductor technology has spurred the great changes in computer system. IWCSEI’08 focused on the computer system education and innovations. The scheduling of real-time jobs is important for computing environments. The paper “A New Slack Reclaiming Algorithm for Real-time Systems” by Wenzhi Chen, Qingsong Shi, Weifang Hu et al presents a new algorithm named HBASH, which is a slack reclaiming algorithm, for server-based real-time systems. The algorithm and the related experiments are both described clearly in this paper. Embedded systems have intense requirements from power consumption and high performance. Wei Hu, Tianzhou Chen. Qingsong Shi et al propose the new architecture for embedded operating system by taking the scratchpad memory into account in the paper “A Novel Operating System on Chip with Information Security Support for Embedded System”. The software-controlled on-chip memory helps the embedded operating system to have lower power consumption and improved performance.