Operating System Design: The Xinu Approach, Linksys Version - Tapa dura

"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, École Polytechnique de Montréal

"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

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 systems. Rather than introduce a new course to teach the important topics of embedded systems programming, this textbook takes the approach of integrating more embedded processing into existing operating systems courses. Designed for advanced undergraduate or graduate courses, the book prepares students for the increased demand for operating system expertise in industry.

Highlights

• Explains how each operating system abstraction can be built and shows how the abstractions can be organized into an elegant, efficient design
• Considers each level of the system individually, beginning with the raw hardware and ending with a working operating system
• Covers every part of the system, so a reader will see how an entire system fits together, not merely how one or two parts interact
• Provides source code for all pieces described in the text, leaving no mystery about any part of the implementation ― a reader can obtain a copy of the system to examine, modify, instrument, measure, extend, or transport to another architecture
• Demonstrates how each piece of an operating system fits into the design, in order to prepare the reader to understand alternative design choices

Beginning with the underlying machine and proceeding step by step through the design and implementation of an actual system, Operating System Design: The Xinu Approach, Linksys Version guides readers through the construction of a traditional process-based operating system using practical, straightforward primitives. It reviews the major system components and imposes a hierarchical design paradigm that organizes the components in an orderly and understandable manner.

All of the code in the book is designed to run on the Linksys router, because it is small, inexpensive, and easily accessible to students. Software and instructions for building a lab that allows students to experiment are available on the author’s website: www.xinu.cs.purdue.edu