Operating System Design: The Xinu Approach, Linksys Version

Operating System Design: The Xinu Approach, Linksys Version provides a comprehensive introduction to Operating System Design, using Xinu, a small, elegant operating system that serves as an example and a pattern for system design. The book focuses the discussion of operating systems on the microkernel operating system facilities used in embedded sy

Table of Contents:
Introduction and Overview. Concurrent Execution and Operating System Services. An Overview of the Hardware and Run-Time Environment. List and Queue Manipulation. Scheduling and Context Switching. More Process Management. Coordination Of Concurrent Processes. Message Passing. Basic Memory Management. High-Level Memory Management and Virtual Memory. High-Level Message Passing. Interrupt Processing. Real-Time Clock Management. Device Independent Input and Output. An Example Device Driver. DMA Devices and Drivers (Ethernet). A Minimal Internet Protocol Stack. A Remote Disk Driver. File Systems. A Remote File Mechanism. A Syntactic Namespace. System Initialization. Exception Handling. System Configuration. An Example User Interface: The Xinu Shell. Appendices. Index.

About the Author :
Professor Comer is an internationally recognized expert on computer networking and the TCP/IP protocols. He has been working with TCP/IP and the Internet since the late 1970s. Dr. Comer established his reputation as a principal investigator on several early Internet research projects. He served as chairman of the CSNET technical committee, chairman of the DARPA Distributed Systems Architecture Board, and was a member of the Internet Activities Board (the group of researchers who built the Internet.). Dr. Comer has created courses on operating systems, computer networks, the Internet, and TCP/IP protocols for a variety of audiences, including in-depth courses for engineers and less technical courses for others; he continues to teach at various industries and networking conferences around the world. In addition, Dr. Comer consults for private industry on the design of systems, networks, and networking equipment. Professor Comer is well-known for his series of ground breaking textbooks on operating systems, computer networks, and the Internet. His books have been translated into sixteen languages, and are widely used in both industry and academia. Dr. Comer's three-volume series Internetworking With TCP/IP is often cited as an authoritative reference for the Internet protocols. More significantly, his texts have been used by fifteen of the top sixteen Computer Science Departments listed in the U.S. News and World Report ranking. Dr. Comer's research is experimental. He and his students design and implement working prototypes of large, complex systems. They measure the performance of the resulting prototypes and assess tradeoffs. The operating system and protocol software that have resulted from his research have been used by industry in a variety of products. For twenty years, Professor Comer served as editor-in-chief of the research journal Software--Practice and Experience, published b

Review :
"Operating System Design: The Xinu Approach is the best book for students and professionals to learn how a computer operating system works. The computer code, along with clear, concise explanations, is simply the best way to learn OS. Readers who study this book carefully will benefit greatly and find it time well spent." -John C. Lin, Bell Labs "... [the author's] focused, clear, and thorough writing have given 'systematic' a new meaning (or perhaps restored its original one). ... non-OS specialists also stand to learn much of what they generally need to know from this excellent book. Furthermore, it is no faint praise for me to say that the book's seamless integration of source code listings into the text ... is the best I've encountered and works very well indeed. Superior and consistently followed C-language coding conventions give further evidence of the meticulousness with which this book was written. ... a most outstanding and practical A-to-Z OS book. It has my highest recommendation." -George Hacken, Computing Reviews, April 2012 "This Xinu book is the best operating systems book on the market because it removes the black magic and explains how to build an OS from the ground up. It's not like other books I tried to read - they gave me a headache. I have already started telling friends how great it is." -David Bafumba-Lokilo, Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal "Understanding an operating system is a very difficult and time-consuming task because it is one of the most complex software systems ever built. Its architecture has multiple layers of software components to manage the underline hardware and provide the system call services to the applications at the top. Knowing the host processor hardware features, the machine languages, compilers, the tool chain, and the procedure calling standard are part of the prerequisites. As a consequence, operating system books can take a black box approach to cover the interface of the system call services and the operating system algorithms in a short time. However students wishing to program an embedded system must learn the details of the implementation. This Xinu book removes the black magic and explains how to build an OS from the ground up. It explains the underlying design policies behind each of the primary components of an operating system kernel and provides the concrete implementation of source code. The Xinu design principles can be found on other commercially available platforms. A device driver on Linux platform is one example. Students majoring in embedded systems are highly recommended to read this book." -Donald D Kim, Information and Communication Engineering Department, Dongguk University, South Korea