Books Or Web Sites On O/S Theory?

M asks: "I've recently been trying to think lots about O/S's and UI's and what would make a good one. But rather than reinventing the wheel I thought I'd start by reading up on what clever people before me have thought. So does anyone know of a definitive guide to O/S theory?"

Comments

Tanenbaum

[Kaufmann]

When I was in school, the reference for "traditional" OS design was Prof. Andrew Tanenbaum's Modern Operating Systems. It discusses both stand-alone and network operating systems, and touches on everything from processor architecture to capabilities, and discusses many favourite algorithms for memory, process and disk space management. It also includes full-fledged descriptions of two operating systems designed and implemented by Tanenbaum and his horde of grad students: the toy Unix clone Minix, and the microkernel-based Amoeba (affectionately dubbed "the cutting edge in archaic OS design").

Of course, since then, a lot of superior and much more interesting ideas on the subject have shown up. By now, a widely agreed-upon goal in the community is to design and develop a reflective, fine-grained OS with a natural and flexible interface, including complete integration with a very high-level language. In particular, the Tunes project (led by my pal Faré) has set out to do precisely this; however, progress is slow to come, and at least half a dozen side projects for "Tunes--"-like systems have popped up, notably Brian Rice's Arrow and Slate, and Tom Novelli's Forth-based Retro. (All of these are buried somewhere in the Tunes server.)

Tunes' Review Subproject has also managed to accumulate a rather comprehensive list of existing, dead and future OSs, as well as critiques thereof; a previous poster has already posted the link.