ardai@decwrl.dec.com (Mike Ardai) (01/12/88)
Minix has finally made Dr. Dobbs! This is an excerpt from Allen Holub's
C Chest column in the January issue:
For a more in-depth introduction to operating systems in general,
Andrew Tanenbaum's Operating Systems: Design and Implementation
is the best book on the subject that I have ever seen. It's both
very complete in its coverage of the subject and extremely well
written. It's not often that a textbook is readable, but this
book is a glowing exception to the obfuscation-is-better rule.)
Over the course of the book, Tanenbaum develops a complete Un*x
look-alike system, called MINIX, that runs on an IBM PC/XT or AT.
He presents all the underlying theory in considerable depth as well
as a complete implementatin (in C) of the MINIX kernel. He covers
virtually every aspect of operating system design, from the lowest
level disk driver (which interfaces directly to the hardware up to
the context-swapping code.
The book includes the full sources to the kernel, and if you
spring for the accompanying disk (it's $80 from Prentice-Hall), you
get an executable operating system and full sources for it and most
of the other programs you need to use the operating system. (The disk
contains a C compiler and an assembler, but you don't get the sources
for these). The system provides something like 65 commands - the
basic stuff such as cp, chmod, and so on and big stuff as well, such
as a shell, an editor, grep, tar, uniq, roff, sort, pr, make, and ar.
All these run under MINIX, of course, not DOS. But for $80, this is
one of the deals of the century. Unlike Gnu, a public-domain Un*x
look-alike system, MINIX is not vaporware. In fact, the $80 you pay
for MINIX is less than what you pay as a media fee when you get the
"free" copy of Gnu.
Michael L. Ardai
Teradyne D.A.T.A Group
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