Developing Your Own 32-Bit Operating System/Book and Cd-Rom by Richard A. Burgess

Product Description

Originally titled Developing Your Own 32 Bit Operating System this book shows you how one man built a complete, 32 bit operating system for the Intel processors from scratch, running on processors from the 80386, all the way up to the Pentium III.

If you want to know what it takes to build an operating system, or you want to build your own, you will need this book! It is indespensible, It covers all of the major components that make up a modern micro-kernel operating system. It includes a CD-ROM containing all the heavily commented code. (Intel 32 bit Assembler and C) to show you how one was built (from concept to debugger). (For Intermediate to Advanced Programming Level)
Product Details
Amazon Sales Rank: #637904 in Books
Published on: 1995-03
Number of items: 1
Binding: Paperback
800 pages
Editorial Reviews

Sams Pub.
This tutorial is designed to build upon an intermediate programmer's knowledge and explain how to design and develop a feature-rich, full operating system. "CD-ROM includes source code, a full 32-bit assembler, and a 32-bit C compiler. Explains the details of all 32-bit operating systems and allows users to actually develop their own customized system. Discusses OS initializations, programming interfaces, k". Covers IBM & Compatibles.

About the Author
Richard A. Burgess is a retired U.S. Coast Guard commissioned officer. His first 10 years in the Coast Guard were in electronics technology and maintenance. His last 10 years of service were all computer-science related; he was the primary software design engineer for the Coast Guard's Commuinication Station Control System, and he headed the Coast Guard's Software Development Standards Team. He taught computer electronics technology at the Computer Learning Center of Washington, D.C., for two years, and he consulted in and around Washington under the guise of the D-Group. He is now the General Manager of Optipat, Inc. and Faxpat, Inc. in Alexandria, Virginia, high-technology, patent-trademark and copyright imaging firms. He would rather be on a beach somewhere in Florida and is working to that end.
Customer Reviews

Lots of reviewers missing the point

The thing most of the reviews seem to be missing is that this was written in 1995 (when Linux didn't even -function-) and OSS was in reality, barely off the ground. Most reviews carp about how this os/book is a "no show" - that's not really the point. It shows all of the bits necessary to write an OS from scratch.

Apparently, few of the readers have actually worked in industry.

Not an educational textbook
Some reviewers may fall back on the sorry excuse that this book is intended for educational purposes (because it does not examine a system being used by IT professionals). But my guess would be that these same reviewers must have ulterior motives ...because this book is, by no means, and educational textbook.

What Burgess does, throughout the book, is basically dump code in your lap. There is no discussion of background theory, which is an absolute necessity when dealing with complicated topics like Intel Protected Mode and the 8259 Programmable Interrupt Controller (PIC). Instead, what he does is throw a bunch of source code at you (to pad the book's size) and then expect you to sift through everything line-by-line, with the expectation that you already know how PIC interrupt control words work, and that you understand how x386 segment descriptors work.

There are a number of books on the Linux Kernel that do not suffer from these shortcomings. Specifically, the book by Bovet and Cesati does an amazing job of explaining all the little details (and don't think that this doesn't make a big difference, the devil is in the details). Check out Bovet's explanation of how Linux uses protected mode memory on Intel, it's well done.

You can tell that PHDs like Bovet actually take pride in their work (unlike some two-dollar ex-technical school instructor who just expects you to learn by osmosis).

Instructional text books are about lowering the learning threshold. The goal is to make a subject as easy to understand as possible. Burgess has not done that in this book. He hands you his code and then expects you to do the requisite foot-work. In this sense, this book is more of a poorly documented journal rather than something that an engineer would use to learn from.

Documentation? Ha, that's a good one. If you're lucky, you might get cryptic one-line comments. The author admits, in certain points in the book, that his lack of documentation came back to haunt him (i.e. "I went back months later, only to realize that I forgot what I had done"). If Burgess worked for me writing software, I would have fired him.

The reality of this book is that Burgess wrote an operating system because he had nothing better to do (he was retired). Retired people are like that; let's climb a mountain because it's there (what else am I going to do? Build a ship in a bottle? Watch TV?). However, once he completed the first cut, I suspect that he lost heart and decided to get a life. This book is his attempt to re-coup on the time he spent writing his own OS. Unfortunately, that's really all this book is. He took what he had and haphazardly crammed it into book format.

Haste makes waste
The one thing that seems to stand out in my mind is how the code seems to be thrown together without any regard for long term maintenance (i.e. assembly code isn't wrapped in C, most of the kernel is in x86 assembly code, doesn't seem to be any sort of structural design underpinning the different components, etc.). This is evident by the fact that the author often admits that he had problems remembering what he had done. If an overall design blueprints/metaphors had existed, he wouldn't have had this problem.

I assume that the author decided he would tackle his OS project and then get on with his life. In other words, let's get this done and then never, NEVER, look back (history seems to have verified this: the author wrote the OS in the early 1990s and then left MMURTL at the station with bus fair in the mid 1990s). There was no home-page on the internet, nor promoter outside of SAMs publishing.

MMURTL did not take off. The hundreds of hours that the author spent building tools and wading around in the dark have been, for all intensive purposes, lost. All that remains is a jumbled book, as a testimony to one man's urge to climb a mountain "because it's there."

Had Richard involved other people and Open-Sourced his creation, the man-power necessary to take MMURTL out of its confusing infantile state may have been available. Instead, Richard decided to build MMURTL utilizing a software team consisting of one person, and the rest is history.

Those readers who want to dig into OS internals should defer to Linux. Unlike MMURTL, Linux is a "live" system (which admins actually use) with all the features you would expect in an enterprise OS. Linux has a sane design, does a sufficient job of isolating hardware specifics, and information/support can be located at dozens of web-sites. Best of all, Linus and his cast of thousands have wrapped the assembly code and given it a structural underpinning.

At the end of the day, this book is a nice concept whose execution never really followed through. There may be one or two useful snippets of code, but I wouldn't invest 6 months of my life to become a MMURTL fanatic. History and evolution were the judges and Linux is the winner.