[TUHS] Article on 'not meant to understand this'

[Marc Rochkind]

"... one lacks true understanding of operating systems until ..."

With this as the standard, I have a false understanding of operating
systems. So, I am ready for the post-truth society we are entering. Are
you? ;-)

On Mon, Jan 16, 2017 at 3:11 AM, Brantley Coile <brantleycoile at me.com>
wrote:

> I agree that one lacks true understanding of operating systems until one
> codes a process switch. My first was in 1979 on a home brew 6800 (not
> 68k).  It was made easier by the fact that the 6800 saved all 64 bits of
> registers on each interrupt. All that was necessary was to wire a timer
> interrupt and change the value of SP in the handler.
>
>   Brantley Coile
>
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
> > On Jan 15, 2017, at 10:15 PM, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> >
> > Yeah, saw it.  I'm of the opinion that you aren't really truly an OS
> > person unless you've written a context switcher.  I wrote one for a
> > user level threading package I did for Udi Manber as a grad student.
> > I did most of the work in C and then dropped to assembler for the
> > trampoline.
> >
> > It's really not that complicated, I think people make it out to be
> > a bigger deal than it is.  You're saving state (registers), switching
> > stacks, and changing the return address so you return in the new
> > process.
> >
> > Well, not that complicated on a simple machine line a VAX or a 68K
> > or a PDP11.  I sort of stopped playing in assembler when super scalar
> > out of order stuff came around and I couldn't get the mental picture
> > of what was where.
> >
> >> On Mon, Jan 16, 2017 at 11:44:44AM +1000, Warren Toomey wrote:
> >> http://thenewstack.io/not-expected-understand-explainer/
> >>
> >> in case you haven't seen it yet.
> >>
> >> Cheers, Warren
> >
> > --
> > ---
> > Larry McVoy                     lm at mcvoy.com
> http://www.mcvoy.com/lm
>
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