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Date:         Wed, 30 Dec 1992 10:12:34 CST
From:         David E Boyes <dboyes@IS.RICE.EDU>
Subject:      Re: questions about the new year
Comments: To: IBM-MAIN@ricevm1.rice.edu
              92 7:39 am

Content-type: text/richtext

> IBM's MVS/ESA for multi-programming/multi-processing issues,
> including SRBs and interrupt routines/DIE exits, as well as
> virtual memory via paging (with interruptable instructions) and
> I/O issues in a virtual memory environment.

You might also want to introduce some of the file processing
issues & some discussion of the whys and wherefores of JCL. An
amazing number of people complain about JCL w/o understanding the
problems it was designed to solve.

> One of the UNIX's?

4.3bsd is probably the canonical choice. The book <u>The Design
and Implementation of 4.3BDS</u> is an excellent text on the
innards of BSD Unix. It's accessible to junior/senior-level CS
students w/o dumbing it down too much.

> The Mach kernal?

You might want to insert some discussion of VM. Mach shares a lot
of the same concepts with VM, and with the redesign of system
services in the last few releases of VM, the synergy is still
working -- compare an IUCV system service to a Mach port service.
There is a large collection of papers available for anonymous FTP from
mach.cs.cmu.edu and emsworth.andrew.cmu.edu on the implementation
of Mach and it's design goals. There is a book on the design and
implementation of Mach in the works, but no date on availability.

In a purely academic sense, you might also want to discuss
TOPS-10 or TOPS-20, as a contemporary to MVS, but as a completely
different approach to virtual memory and the timesharing
paradigm. Digital Press' <u>Computer Engineering: A DEC View of
Hardware Systems Design</u> by C. Gordon Bell, <i>et al.</i> has
a nice collection of papers on the evolution of the PDP-10 and
the software architecture built on top of the hardware.

You might also want to include some stuff about Amoeba and the
new generation of distributed systems that Tannenbaum and company
are fiddling with in the Netherlands. I can sent you PostScript
versions of most of the Amoeba papers, or if there's enough
demand, I'll put them out for FTP.

> Multix?
      ^^

MULTICS -- well, I don't know. I'm not sure that TOPS-20 didn't
have more impact on the design of operating systems than MULTICS
did, but it's certainly worth mentioning.


> MS-DOS (to show how everything can be done wrong or at least
>         be missing - a non-operating system).

Personally, if you're going to talk about monitors, you'd be
better off talking about CP/M or RT-11 than MS-DOS. Like you
said, MS-DOS is the BOS of the 1980s, lots of stuff done wrong.
CP/M and RT-11 had much more impact on the design of operating
systems than MS-DOS has.

You don't say whether this is a survey course or whether you
actually want the students to get their hands dirty with a OS
implementation. If you want to give them an OS to play with,
you should seriously look at Minix. It gives them a mini Unix V7
clone with source to bang on and find out how things work. The
text that goes along with it does a pretty good job of explaining
the guts of the OS and some of the design decisions for various
subsystems. Minix is fairly cheap, too -- $75 academic for book &
diskettes for PC, Mac, Amiga, and a few others, I think. Andy
Tannenbaum did a nice job on Minix as a teaching tool.
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