install Minix CD-ROM-2.0 on qemu

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 […]

Why MULTICS is so slow

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 […]

different i-node for different file type?

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 […]

disk IO: interleave

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 […]

chapter 1

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 […]

the start

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 […]

Damm Small Linux

I gave Damm Small Linux a try today. I’ve heard it before but this article makes me decided to try it out.
There are many ways to boot DSL, CD, USB, or from a host OS, as I’m still concerning the many old PCs that can’t boot from USB, I decided to give the embeded version […]

bochs virtual network

device type fbsd: guest OS can’t communicat with host OS. There must be another physical box available. And this made accessing the internet from the guest OS quite complicated in my situation.
device type tun: several google searches didn’t show a successful story. I remember I saw a tun device for vmware on FreeBSD, but can’t […]

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