O/S design & implementation - was Re: FPGA tricks - Re: using new technology on old machines

[Sean Caron]

I thought I'd take a quick spin through the operating systems section of my
library now that I'm at home just to give you some titles that you might
want to check out.

1. Toby mentions Tanenbaum's Minix book and that's a fairly canonical text
... there is a lot of great information in there but IMO some parts can be
a little opaque and overly verbose ... it can be nice to have some
supplementary sources; see (2) :O

2. For more illumination on UNIX, I find both Maurice Bach's Design of the
UNIX Operating System and McKusick's 4.4 BSD book to be well-written.

3. There's a design example (source with walkthrough) for a  simple task
scheduler for the PDP-11 in Eckhouse's Minicomputer Systems: Organization
and Programming (PDP-11 edition).

4. Madnick/Donovan Operating Systems or Donovan's Systems Programming ...
were, I imagine, the canon of the 70s and early 80s ... these are written
mostly with the S/360 in mind ...

5. For something maybe less academic and a bit more practical, look for the
"MMURTL book"; I believe the title is "Developing your own 32-bit Operating
System" by Burgess ... neat book ... I've leafed through it but I down own
a copy. Platform is i386.

6. There are also a lot of practicals on Merrill Press that are very good
i.e. The 68000 Micrporocessor by Antonakos ... that will demonstrate the
implementation of a basic ROM monitor from scratch ...  I found these books
very illuminating and I think they can be a good bridge between the more
theoretical treatment given in a lot of textbooks and the actual
nitty-gritty of writing some code on bare-metal hardware.

You can pick up a used copy of any of these books for a buck or two on the
used market; that's hard to beat.

That's pretty much all I got ... always looking for interesting books on
this topic contemporary or historic; if anyone else has titles to share
that they could recommend, I'm always happy to hear.

Best,

Sean



On Mon, Jun 15, 2015 at 6:42 PM, Toby Thain <toby at telegraphics.com.au>
wrote:

> On 2015-06-15 12:18 PM, ben wrote:
>
>> On 6/15/2015 9:08 AM, Toby Thain wrote:
>>
>>> On 2015-06-15 9:35 AM, Dave G4UGM wrote:
>>>
>>>> I don't think it is over kill. If you want over kill try this:-
>>>>
>>>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALXax3Gydl8
>>>>
>>>> and FPGA implementation of the Baby or SSEM which had 32x32 bits of
>>>>
>>> RAM. The implementation uses around 1% of the Spartan 3E 1200K gates,
>>> and that includes the logic to generate the VGA which is around 50% of
>>> the circuit. I expect to get it on a 100K gate chip but that’s still
>>> over-kill.
>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>> Speaking of VGA, you might like this:
>>>
>>> http://www.fpgarelated.com/showarticle/42.php
>>>
>>> --Toby
>>>
>>>
>> But alas the software does *not* support the older chips.
>> You want to make a mod 5 years down the road, sorry we do not
>> support that model any more. TTL needs to  be stock piled
>> now for the next +50 years.
>> I finally got 18 bit FPGA computer (DE1) design I like, that
>> is early 70's speed. 1.5 us core. What I am having problems
>> is finding a good book on Operating Systems from that Era
>> that is online, any one know a good book? I have software
>> that I need to write.
>>
>
> I think Tanenbaum should be fine? A lot of it is fairly timeless.
>
> https://archive.org/details/OperatingSystemsDesignImplementation
>
> --Toby
>
>  Ben.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>