While when I doing the “2008 plan” I found there’s something I didn’t finished last year. Among them is learning the Minix code. I’ve read all the principle chapters, and left reading the source code behind and never finished that. So to make a good start for this year, I decide to make a test […]
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Posted 09 January 2008
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Well, everyone in the *nix world heard about the MULTICS system, and because it’s so slow, Unix was developed.
And today, when I reading the memory management chapter of Minix, I understand part of the reason why MULTICS is so slow: To locate a single address in the memory, it will need to look up 3 […]
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Posted 24 March 2007
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This is mostly a note for myself.
In 3.2.4, it is said that “for a special file, this i-node contains the major device number, and the minor device number”. This is different from what we know for normal files, where the i-node contains file access time, etc.
It is not effecient to hold one i-node structure for […]
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Posted 13 September 2006
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Well I am reading the paper book when I’m not in front of a computer. There’s no problem on this when I’m reading the principle chapters. However, it is really not easy to read the code on a paper if you are too customized to the facilities of a computer, like tags search and syntax […]
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Posted 07 September 2006
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I was reading about disk IO this morning. In chapter 3.1.3, it is said that the disk need to be formatted with the number interlaving, so that we’ll need less disk circlings to get the data we need.
My question is, all these is based on one assumption: that the buffer on the disk controller can […]
In theory when we talk about process table, we refer it as a whole data structure. However this is not necessarily true.
On page 52 of the book it is mentioned that the process table that handles process management, memory management, and file management are seperated in different modules with different data structure.
This is the first […]
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Posted 09 August 2006
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I’ve finished reading Chapter 1 today. This chapter talks on the bird view. Most concept are pretty familiar with me. There are two things stroke me:
The Minix core only have 59 system calls to be POSIX compitable. I never thought it could be so less…
Why the best is the best. On page 25 of my […]
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Posted 07 August 2006
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I’ve started a new plan to learn about operating system internals.
I’ve got a pretty high score for the operating system class when I was in school, however, that’s only the theory. I read the first edition of the Minix book when I was in school, but didn’t finish that before I return it to the […]
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Posted 03 August 2006
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