A system generation for a small operating system

ABSTRACT

A system generation utility has been developed to assist students in producing IBM PC-based multitasking applications targeted for the small operating system (SOS) developed by Jerry E. Sayers. Our aim is to augment SOS by enabling a student to interactively tailor the characteristics of the operating system to meet the requirements of a particular application. The system allows the user to adjust factors such as: initial state, priority, and scheduling method of concurrently executed tasks, and, also, use of system resources. A custom operating system is produced by invoking a MAKE utility to bind SOS with application-specific code, in addition to intermediate source code created during the system generation process.Testing of the system included implementing an application that adds column vectors in a 5 × 5000 matrix concurrently. Further testing involves using the system generation utility along with SOS as part of an undergraduate operating systems class at East Tennessee State University.

REFERENCES

• 1: Jerry Sayers, A small operating system, Proceedings of the 1990 ACM SIGSMALL/PC symposium on Small systems, p.132-142, March 28-30, 1990, Crystal City, Virginia, United States [doi>10.1145/99412.99447]
• 2: Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Operating systems: design and implementation, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1987
• 3: Douglas Comer , Timothy V. Fossum, Operating system design. Vol. 1: the XINU approach (PC edition), Prentice-Hall, Inc., Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1988
• 4: J. Hummel, Xinu/WU: an improved PC-Xinu clone?, ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, v.21 n.1, p.226-230, Feb. 1989
• 5: Al Stevens, D-Flat and the C preprocessor, Dr. Dobb's Journal, v.16 n.9, p.109-ff., Sept. 1991

INDEX TERMS

Keywords:
concurrent processing, multitasking, operating systems, system generation