From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: Brian L.Stuart <blstuart@bellsouth.net>
To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu>
Subject: Re: [9fans] MS Research reinvents Inferno?
Date: Wed, 14 Dec 2005 10:42:19 -0500
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> I've several texts on OS that are pretty good for undergrad class, but
> is there an equivalent to Knuth's `Art of Computer Programming' or the
> second Dragon book?  Seems that a lot of wasted effort could be
> avoided by having a good servey of the ideas and references to
> previous work.

My first reaction is to say be patient, I just signed the contract a couple
of weeks ago.  My other reaction is to say I can't presume to be compared
to such august company.  But the reality is that I am in the process of
writing an OS textbook with the intent of making a small step in that
direction.

The rest of this is details about the book, so feel free to move on to
the next message without hurting my feelings...
The book is divided into groups of three chapters, each group covering
a major topic.  The major topics are Intro (history, organization, etc),
processes, memory, I/O, file systems, security and distributed systems.
There's also a group of three appendices covering a review of hardware/
architecture.  The first chapter in each group covers the general principles
and gives a brief view into how that topic is implemented in a number of
example systems.  The exact set of examples is not finalized but will at
least include MULTICS, RT-11, 6th edition UNIX, 4.3BSD, VMS, NT/2000/XP
and Xen.  Most likely Plan 9 will also appear there.  I want to also include
at least one example from the big iron world, but need to find a good
reference for it.  The second and third chapters of each section take
a detailed look at implementation.  The second chapter is on Linux and
the third on Inferno.  The plan is for these chpaters to cover a level of
detail something like Lions did for 6th edition UNIX, but probably not
quite as thorough.  Rather than separate the code and commentary
like Lions did, I'm making it look more similar to Knuth's literate programming
where the commentary is interspersed with pretty-printed code.

If we manage to keep to the publisher's schedule and I survive the process,
it should see the light of day in time for fall semester 2007.  So if you hear
the murmer of insane babbling coming from the direction of Memphis,
you know what it is.

Brian L. Stuart