3rd Edition

Operating System Design The Xinu Approach

By Douglas Comer Copyright 2025
573 Pages 73 Color & 4 B/W Illustrations
by Chapman & Hall

573 Pages 73 Color & 4 B/W Illustrations
by Chapman & Hall

Lauded for avoiding the typical vague, high-level survey approach found in many texts, earlier editions of this bestselling book removed the mystery by explaining the internal structure of an operating system in clear, readable prose. The third edition of Operating System Design: The Xinu Approach expands and extends the text to include new chapters on a pipe mechanism, multicore operating... Read more

Preface   About the Author   1. Introduction And Overview   2. Concurrent Execution And Operating System Services   3. An Overview Of The Hardware And Runtime Environment   4. List And Queue Manipulation   5. Scheduling And Context Switching   6. More Process Management   7. Coordination Of Concurrent Processes   8. Message Passing   9. Basic Memory Management   10. High-level Memory Management and Virtual Memory   11. High-level Message Passing   12. Interrupt Processing   13. Real-time Clock Management   14. Device–independent Input And Output   15. An Example Device Driver   16. DMA Devices And Drivers (Ethernet)   17. A Minimal Internet Protocol Stack   18. A Remote Disk Driver   19. File Systems   20. A Remote File System   21. A Syntactic Namespace   22. System Initialization   23. Subsystem Initialization And Memory Marking   24. Exception Handling   25. System Configuration   26. A Pipe Mechanism   27. An Example User Interface: The Xinu Shell   28. Multicore Systems   29. Operating Systems Everywhere   Index

Biography

Douglas Earl Comer is a professor of computer science at Purdue University, where he teaches courses on operating systems and computer networks. He has written numerous research papers and textbooks, and currently heads several networking research projects. He has been involved in TCP/IP and internetworking since the late 1970s, and is an internationally recognized authority. He designed and implemented X25NET and Cypress networks, and the Xinu operating system. He is director of the Internetworking Research Group at Purdue, editor of Software - Practice and Experience, and a former member of the Internet Architecture Board. Comer completed the original version of Xinu (and wrote correspondent book The Xinu Approach) in 1979. Since then, Xinu has been expanded and ported to a wide variety of platforms, including: IBM PC, Macintosh, Digital Equipment Corporation VAX and DECstation 3100, Sun Microsystems Sun-2, Sun-3 and SPARCstations, and Intel Pentium. It has been used as the basis for many research projects. Furthermore, Xinu has been used as an embedded system in products by companies such as Motorola, Mitsubishi, Hewlett-Packard, and Lexmark.