What's a good way for autodidacts to fiddle through this?
Xv6, a simple Unix-like teaching operating system
11–20 of 100 posts
Re: Xv6, a simple Unix-like teaching operating system
#12Why Unix v6? Why teach with a 50 years old design? I feel to teach the fundamentals of an operating system, i.e. scheduling, IPC, address space management, a microkernel design would be better.
Re: Xv6, a simple Unix-like teaching operating system
#13Why Unix v6? Why teach with a 50 years old design? I feel to teach the fundamentals of an operating system, i.e. scheduling, IPC, address space management, a microkernel design would be better.
I'm guessing many professors don't choose Xv6 for their operating systems class because it's a great design. Some probably pick it because it's good enough, simple and easier to teach in a single semester where students are also taking other classes. Are you saying the microkernel design is not only better but also easier to teach?
Re: Xv6, a simple Unix-like teaching operating system
#14Why Unix v6? Why teach with a 50 years old design? I feel to teach the fundamentals of an operating system, i.e. scheduling, IPC, address space management, a microkernel design would be better.
You gotta walk before you can run. Xv6 is basic, but it’s a great intro to operating system fundamentals that can fit in a semester for people who’ve never seen these concepts before.
Re: Xv6, a simple Unix-like teaching operating system
#15[flagged]
Re: Xv6, a simple Unix-like teaching operating system
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
What I would love is something similar that could boot on raspberry pi...
Ultibo is pretty cool… https://ultibo.org/ It’s a bare metal Free Pascal environment for Raspberry Pi.
Disclaimer: I've made LEDs blink with an Arduino and I think microcontrollers are cool, but I'm an embedded systems noob for sure :)
I poked around the FAQ a bit and I'm kinda confused about this.
Do you write bare-metal Pascal programs in this? I.e., do you write a Pascal program that uses Ultibo libraries to run without a separate operating system?
How is the resulting program different from a unikernel?
I think I'm mostly confused about why the IDE is bare-metal (why not write your Pascal programs in a normal environment and then run it bare metal on your RPi)D
Re: Xv6, a simple Unix-like teaching operating system
#17Why Unix v6? Why teach with a 50 years old design? I feel to teach the fundamentals of an operating system, i.e. scheduling, IPC, address space management, a microkernel design would be better.
Vonn Neumann architecture is 80 yrs old. Why is it relevant how long a design is if it's still the most relevant and widely used one? The basic abstractions of unix v6 still holds to this day.
The main difference between Microkernels and Monolithic is how address space get to be shared between userland and kernel. I don't see how microkernel design would be "better". Why teach a design that isn't widely used?
Re: Xv6, a simple Unix-like teaching operating system
#18Why Unix v6? Why teach with a 50 years old design? I feel to teach the fundamentals of an operating system, i.e. scheduling, IPC, address space management, a microkernel design would be better.
While microkernels play a vital role in our software ecosystem, most of the software anyone interacts with is not coordinated with a microkernel. Furthermore most of the software on the internet is not run by a microkernel, nor most of the software available on the internet. I suspect such a course would not prepare one well to either work with kernels or reason about the kernels you work with as a professional.
Re: Xv6, a simple Unix-like teaching operating system
#19Why Unix v6? Why teach with a 50 years old design? I feel to teach the fundamentals of an operating system, i.e. scheduling, IPC, address space management, a microkernel design would be better.
Vonn Neumann architecture is 80 yrs old. Why is it relevant how long a design is if it's still the most relevant and widely used one? The basic abstractions of unix v6 still holds to this day. The main difference between Microkernels and Monolithic is how address space get to be shared between userland and kernel. I don't see how microkernel design would be "better". Why teach a design that isn't widely used?
The Vonn Neumann architecture does not expose the same structural flaws monolithic kernels do—namely, their (of course tendency in modern computing to be) massive size and their failure scenarios in the event of a problem.
Old is not always a problem, but monolithic kernels face the same problems they did in the 80s. It's not surprising Apple is moving away from kernel drivers and into userspace functionality.
Re: Xv6, a simple Unix-like teaching operating system
#20Why Unix v6? Why teach with a 50 years old design? I feel to teach the fundamentals of an operating system, i.e. scheduling, IPC, address space management, a microkernel design would be better.
Studying precursor technologies to ones popular today is a great way to learn what led us to this point, what tradeoffs were made and why, and perhaps what we might've lost as well. Students can get a deeper appreciation for new technologies when they're eventually exposed to them. This can only broaden their horizons in their future careers.
As someone who missed this part of history, I would love to have learned about it in college.