Operating System Design: The Xinu Approach (Macintosh Edition) [Hardcover]

Douglas Comer (Author), Steven Munson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1989 | Series: Macintosh Edition (Book 1)

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 programmers can learn how protocol software fits into an operating system and how VAX software works as well.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

M- --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 626 pages
• Publisher: Prentice Hall; Macintosh ed edition (February 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 013638529X
• ISBN-13: 978-0136385295
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 7 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,996,424 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great manual on simple OS design, June 1, 2000

By 

Robert D. C. Shearer (USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Operating System Design: The XINU Approach (v. 1) (Paperback)

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.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing but informative...I take back that statement., September 11, 2001

By 

Paul Belikian (Pasadena, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Operating System Design: The XINU Approach, Volume 1, PC Edition (Operating System Design Vol. 1) (Paperback)

For the most part this book is informative. If you have no idea of how a basic Operating System functions, or what it's responsibilities are, then this book will definitely clue you in. However, this book seemed to fall short of what the writers promised. For example, the version of XINU described in this book boots from DOS. I am suspicious of any operating system that boots from another operating system and then uses the services of it...it reminds me of Microsoft Windows 3.1. The OS also uses and relies on some of the PC's BIOS routines and services. While that technique makes the OS portable on different PCs, it limits its use only to PCs and hides a lot of operations that (in my opinion) should be shown. After reading it a few times, I found that the book was quite helpful after all. The OS has been ported to many other CPU's. The full source code can be found on the internet. The OS is quite powerful but still is simple (I was able to port the code to run on a 68010 project of mine; seeing the ported versions and the book's theory was enough to guide me). A decent book, it doesn't describe an operating system 'from the ground up', but comes close to it. Sure there are other operating systems out there with open source, but how many of those tell you what each function of the code does and what role these functions play in a OS?

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great book to learn Operating System, September 10, 2001

By 

"asok_s" (Henderson, NV United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Operating System Design: The XINU Approach (v. 1) (Paperback)

Xinu is a beautiful OS and this book is a very
readable description of Xinu. Xinu with its threads
and micro kernel architecture is very suitable for
embedded applications and it has TCP/IP stack too.
Xinu is not a toy OS or even merely an
educational 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 at
Purdue for giving Xinu to the world.