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?"

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 [tunes.org] (led by my pal Faré [slashdot.org]) 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.

Some more ...

[frederik]

Tanenbaum has written another fine book on Operating Systems ~ 3 years ago. It is called "Operating systems; Design and implementation" and is focused (as you could guess from the name) on the implemenation of an OS.
If you are interested in Linux, the book "Linux Kernel Internals" published by Addison Wesley might be a good point to start with.

A good 'hands-on' book

[dutky]

[phptr.com]

Operating System Design: The XINU Approach by Douglas Comer (from Prentice Hall [prenhall.com]) was a really good book for me. It concentrates more on building a working operating system than on theoretical issues, which makes it a lot easier to read than some of the more academic texts. (Tenanbaum, Silberschatz and Galvin, etc.) There used to be several versions of the book, one each for the PDP-11, IBM-PC, and Macintosh, but you may not be able to find anything other than the IBM-PC version these days.

I also have an old copy of The Design and Implementation of the 4.3BSD UNIX Operating System by Leffler, McKusick, Karels and Quarterman, from Addison-Wesley [aw.com], which was a pretty thorough coverage of unix concepts when it was written. There is likely to be a more up-to-date contemporary edition. [aw.com] (and you can probably find a small army of similar books, including the excelent Linux Kernel Internals [aw.com] by Beck, Böhme, Dziadzka, et. al. also from Addison-Wesley) Finally, you may want to pick up a copy of the anotated unix source code Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition, with Source Code [peer-to-peer.com] by John Lions from Peer-to-Peer Communications. [peer-to-peer.com]

OS and UI?

[Peter Eckersley]

hmmm....

the previous posts cover all the in-depth technical books on OS design which I've come across in my travels.

However, the original question asked about something else as well... user interfaces.

In *nix land, OS design and UI design are completely different planets. As far as I could gather from reading "Showstopper", this is not quite so true in Windows land.

There are probably a lot more starting points for UI design than kernel architecture; the topic is somewhat more accessible. Of course, having said that I can't recommend anything brilliant, but perhaps someone else can.