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

[ben]

On 6/15/2015 5:10 PM, Sean Caron wrote:
> 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
>
Since the computer I designed is a *small* computer, 8 & 16 bit 
operating systems is what I am looking at for ideas. This is a 18 bit 
cpu with the concept, byte access of memory needs true 18 bit addressing
and 16 bits is bit small for general 1970's data. Think of it as a 
something like a 9 bit 6800 cpu.
Ben.