naim@prairie.uswest.com (Naim Abdullah) (06/27/91)
I have heard of a forthcoming book on Mach:
"The Design of the Mach Operating system"
by
N. Bitar, A. Langermann and E. Sheinbrood
Does anybody know the publisher and when the book will
be released ?
Naim Abdullah
Dept. of EECS,
Northwestern University
Internet: naim@eecs.nwu.edunahum@unreal.cs.umass.edu (Erich Nahum) (06/27/91)
In article <1991Jun26.182905.11834@cherokee.uswest.com> naim@prairie.uswest.com (Naim Abdullah) writes: >I have heard of a forthcoming book on Mach: > > "The Design of the Mach Operating system" > by > N. Bitar, A. Langermann and E. Sheinbrood How can a book with this title not have Rick Rashid on the author list? I've read a lot of Mach papers, but I haven't heard of these people. Perhaps they're from Mt. Xinu? Wouldn't it make sense that people who actually did work on the system, like Tevanian, Young, Golub, Fitzgerald (OK, Accent), and Black, be involved with the book? Seriously though, perhaps someone at CMU can comment as to the authenticity of this book, the authors' involvement, etc. -Erich ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Erich Nahum A305 Lederle Graduate Research Center Real-Time Systems Group Department of Computer Science nahum@cs.umass.edu University of Massachusetts at Amherst (413) 545-4753 Amherst, MA 01003
sp@mirabeau.osf.fr (Simon Patience) (06/27/91)
In article <32674@dime.cs.umass.edu>, nahum@unreal.cs.umass.edu (Erich Nahum) writes: > In article <1991Jun26.182905.11834@cherokee.uswest.com> naim@prairie.uswest.com (Naim Abdullah) writes: > >I have heard of a forthcoming book on Mach: > > > > "The Design of the Mach Operating system" > > by > > N. Bitar, A. Langermann and E. Sheinbrood > > How can a book with this title not have Rick Rashid on the author list? > > I've read a lot of Mach papers, but I haven't heard of these people. > Perhaps they're from Mt. Xinu? > > Wouldn't it make sense that people who actually did work on the system, > like Tevanian, Young, Golub, Fitzgerald (OK, Accent), and Black, be > involved with the book? > > Seriously though, perhaps someone at CMU can comment as to the > authenticity of this book, the authors' involvement, etc. Well I am not from CMU but I will comment anyway. Nawaf Bitar: HP Apollo, started the internal Mach project in Apollo, worked for the OSF Research Institute which is working closely with CMU on Mach 3. Apart from having worked extensively with Mach, he has also given many Usenix/Europen and the like tutorials on the system. A. Langermann: Encore computer. One of the Architects of Encores release of Mach which has parallelised the BSD part. He also works extensively with OSF/1 particularly with file system and MP issues. Eric Shienbrood: One of the architects of OSF/1. It would probably be quicker to least the areas he did not contribute to in OSF/1 and the Mach kernel does not fall into that list! All three have excellent credentials for writing this book as they have extensive experience with Mach itself and implementing systems using Mach. This is not a perfect resume of these peoples careers and I apologize for any important omissions but these peoples knowledge of Mach is not lacking. Simon Patience Open Software Foundation Phone: +33-76-63-48-72 Research Institute FAX: +33-76-51-05-32 2 Avenue De Vignate Email: sp@gr.osf.org 38610 Gieres, France uunet!gr.osf.org!sp
fkittred@bbn.com (Fletcher Kittredge) (06/27/91)
In article <32674@dime.cs.umass.edu> nahum@unreal.cs.umass.edu (Erich Nahum) writes: >In article <1991Jun26.182905.11834@cherokee.uswest.com> naim@prairie.uswest.com (Naim Abdullah) writes: >>I have heard of a forthcoming book on Mach: >> >> "The Design of the Mach Operating system" >> by >> N. Bitar, A. Langermann and E. Sheinbrood > >How can a book with this title not have Rick Rashid on the author list? Why do you think that Richie and Thompson never wrote a book on the design of the Unix operating system? Who is this man Bach anyhow? > >I've read a lot of Mach papers, but I haven't heard of these people. >Perhaps they're from Mt. Xinu? Really? You seemed to have missed much. At Encore, A. Langermann has done some of the most significant work on taking Mach and making it really work. Perhaps you should include in your Mach education with some of his many papers on the subject. Two that I though where in everyone's canon are: Mach/4.3BSD a Conservative Approach to Parallelization Joseph Boykin and Alan Langerman Computing Systems, Vol. 3, No. 1 A Highly-Parallelized Mach-based Vnode Filesystem Alan Langerman et al. Proceedings of Winter 1990 Usenix Conference, Jan. 1990 If you don't know whom Eric Sheinbrood is you are really out of touch. It is even more difficult to conceive that you could be involved with Mach and not know whom N. Bitar is. However, I understand through UCLA and the ACM he is continuing to offer courses in Mach internals, so perhaps you could catch one. > >Wouldn't it make sense that people who actually did work on the system, >like Tevanian, Young, Golub, Fitzgerald (OK, Accent), and Black, be >involved with the book? No, it wouldn't necessarily make sense. Writing a book takes an enormous amount of effort. Not everyone has the time or energy to devote to the process. Some of the people on this list are real busy doing other important things. If memory serves, I think this book orignally had some of the people on this list as authors. My guess is that they were to busy to contribute. > >Seriously though, perhaps someone at CMU can comment as to the >authenticity of this book, the authors' involvement, etc. I don't understand what you are implying here. Do you think that Langermann et. al. are going to deceive us about the design of Mach? > >-Erich > >------------------------------------------------------------------------------ >Erich Nahum A305 Lederle Graduate Research Center >Real-Time Systems Group Department of Computer Science >nahum@cs.umass.edu University of Massachusetts at Amherst >(413) 545-4753 Amherst, MA 01003 /* Fletcher Kittredge * BBN Software Products * 150 CambridgePark Dr, Cambridge, MA. 02140 * 617-873-3465 / fkittred@bbn.com / fkittred@das.harvard.edu */
nahum@unreal.cs.umass.edu (Erich Nahum) (06/28/91)
It seems some apologies, or at least explanations, are in order, on my part. My original post was not meant to badmouth the authors; rather, it was to find out who they are. If it came across that way, then I apologize. In article <64883@bbn.BBN.COM> fkittred@spca.bbn.com (Fletcher Kittredge) writes: >Why do you think that Richie and Thompson never wrote a book on the design of >the Unix operating system? Who is this man Bach anyhow? I didn't mean to imply that only Rick Rashid is qualified to write a Mach book. Obviously Bach's Unix book is a good counterexample. This was meant more as a joke, as the `seriously' line later suggests. I guess I should have put a smiley face, though. >>I've read a lot of Mach papers, but I haven't heard of these people. >>Perhaps they're from Mt. Xinu? > >Really? You seemed to have missed much. At Encore, A. Langermann has done >some of the most significant work on taking Mach and making it really work. >Perhaps you should include in your Mach education with some of his many >papers on the subject. > [two USENIX ref's omitted] As a grad student studying operating systems, my slant has been mostly academic, and most of my sources are from ACM and IEEE/CS. I have recently joined USENIX, though, and will look up these references. >If you don't know whom Eric Sheinbrood is you are really out of touch. It >is even more difficult to conceive that you could be involved with Mach and I have not claimed to be `involved' with Mach. I've simply read through a number of papers in SOSP, ASPLOS, ACM TOCS, IEEE TOC, etc. In an advanced OS class, though, I did go through some of the 1.0 VM and IPC source code. >not know whom N. Bitar is. However, I understand through UCLA and the ACM >he is continuing to offer courses in Mach internals, so perhaps you could >catch one. I would be thrilled to catch one. There was a Mach workshop in Boston last year that I wanted to go to, but couldn't due to time and financial constraints. These things cost money. >>Wouldn't it make sense that people who actually did work on the system, >>like Tevanian, Young, Golub, Fitzgerald (OK, Accent), and Black, be >>involved with the book? > >No, it wouldn't necessarily make sense. Writing a book takes an enormous >amount of effort. Not everyone has the time or energy to devote to the This is certainly true. However, Patterson and Hennessy have shown it is possible that top-flight researchers can take the time to produce an excellent text. >>Seriously though, perhaps someone at CMU can comment as to the >>authenticity of this book, the authors' involvement, etc. > >I don't understand what you are implying here. Do you think that >Langermann et. al. are going to deceive us about the design of Mach? This is NOT the case. I did not mean to imply this at all. `Authenticity' is a loaded word, and was a bad choice. As I mentioned above, I was looking to find out who the authors were. Now I know, and thanks to various people for enlightening me. Believe me, I'll be one of the first in line to get this book! -Erich ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Erich Nahum A305 Lederle Graduate Research Center Real-Time Systems Group Department of Computer Science nahum@cs.umass.edu University of Massachusetts at Amherst (413) 545-4753 Amherst, MA 01003