The design of an object-oriented operating system (abstract)

Abstract

This tutorial describes the object-oriented design of a complete operating system, written to be object-oriented, with a user and application interface that is object-oriented. The main objective is to illustrate object-oriented design trade-offs by studying a large object-oriented system, the Choices operating system.Choices is an object-oriented multiprocessor operating system that runs native on SPARC stations, Encore Multimaxes, and IBM PCs. The system is built from a number of frameworks that implement a general file system, persistent store for persistent objects, process switching, parallel processing, distributed processing, interrupt handling, virtual memory, networking, and interprocess communication.If you bring an IBM/PC 386-based portable computer running MS-DOS to the course then you may experiment by writing application programs for PC-Choices. All participants will receive a copy of PC-Choices on a floppy.Participants should have experience with building object-oriented systems and have a basic understanding of operating systems design. Reading knowledge of C++ is helpful, but not necessary.