Operating System Design

by Douglas E. Comer

In this book Douglas Comer dispels the magic from operating system design and consolidates the body of material into a systematic discipline. The author reviews the major system components and a structure that organizes them in an orderly, understandable manner.

The author guides you through the construction of a conventional process-based system, using practical straightforward primitives. He begins with a bare machine and proceeds step-by-step through the design and implementation of a small, elegant system.

Called Xinu, the system serves as an example and a pattern for system design. It includes all the components that constitute an ordinary operating system'. memory management, process management, process coordination and synchronization, interprocess communication, real-time clock management, device drivers, intermachine communication, networks, and a file system.

To use this book you should have had experience in writing programs in a high-level language like Pascal, PL/I, or C, and you should understand basic data structures such as linked lists, stacks, and queues.

Genres: Computer Science, Programming, Reference

960 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1983

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had been doing system programming for a few years, read several books about operating systems, and written a couple of device drivers for UNIX before I encountered this book. I was comfortable working on existing operating systems, but writing a complete operating system seems like it would be overwhelming. Reading Xinu, and later doing labs on a PDP-11? gave me confidence to take on much more challenging projects and led me to conclude that if I needed to, I could write an OS from the ground up.