Operating System Design: The Xinu Approach, Vol. I

by Douglas E. Comer

Book Overview

An important two-volume series, the first volume describes each step of the design and decision making process, while Volume II adds internetworking and user interface software. Professional software... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0136375391
• ISBN13: 9780136375395
• Release Date: November 1983
• Publisher: Pearson
• Length: 496 Pages
• Weight: 2.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 7.0" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

Must have for your toolbox

The text provides insight into the structure of many OS's, which can easily be used to understand other systems. It's clear and simple to understand, even though it's circa 1983! A must have for anyone working with embedded OS. Search the web for full source, which is readily available. The section on drivers and interfacing is especially usefull.

Excellent book for embedded goodies

Embedded processor are becoming more powerfull and popular. Even a small embedded processor can compete with the first PC's. Because of this, there is a great demand for OS's for these processors. This is were Xinu comes in (Full multitasking kernel, filesystem, semaphores, timers, device drivers...) and best of all, it is not resource hungry ( Bottom line is that this is an excellent book to teach you the basic's of OS's. This book is worth having..

Great book to learn Operating System

Xinu is a beautiful OS and this book is a veryreadable description of Xinu. Xinu with its threadsand micro kernel architecture is very suitable forembedded applications and it has TCP/IP stack too.Xinu is not a toy OS or even merely aneducational OS. I personally ported Xinu to an R3041(MIPS) based board for an industrial application and it worked very well. Hats off to Comer and others atPurdue for giving Xinu to the world.

Great manual on simple OS design

This book does what no nother OS book has attempted: walk the reader through the implementation of a complete operating system from the hardware up. The full source code for the complete OS is included.While this book does not cover many of the more advanced concepts (including virtual memory and memory protection; the hardware considered does not support such features) it does successfully demonstrate how the whole system fits together. The book is very accessible and is suitable for readers who have only application-level programming experience.I strongly recommend reading this book cover to cover and then purchasing a more advanced book (such as _Modern Operating Systems_ by Tanenbaum) as a reference to sophisticated features.

XINU is a marvelous operating system for embedded computers.

This book is a college-level text that explains and documents XINU, a compact, robust operating system. The code for every function appears in the book embedded in explanatory text. The author exposes his design choices and the reasons behind them. Exercises encourage thinking about alternative methods and added features. I used XINU for a very demanding real-time system. I found it to be capable and robust. The superb documentation found in the book gave confidence to write several device drivers for some peculiar peripherals. This the best of the dozen or so books on operating systems that I've read.