subingangadharan / cuteos-references

Documentation, references, and collected academic research for the ‘Cute!’ Kernel.

Specifications, manuals, academic papers used, and notes written while developing the Cute kernel.

##Documentation:

01-ProjectGoals.txt

What all of this is about!

CuteNotes.txt

Important technical details, bugs, and experiences discovered while developing this project. That's the repository's main document.

papers/sched/00-README

Study notes for a number of scheduling-related papers.

These notes discuss the origin of multi-level feedback queues (beginning form the 1962's CTSS system, and moving to the Unix jungle of SVR2/3, Solaris, and the BSDs), spinlocks (from VAX/VMS), general- purpose kernel preemption, per-CPU runqueues and data areas (VAX/VMS, DEC OSF/1, and WinNT), and thread scheduling soft and hard affinity (by the innovative DEC engineers again).

papers/fs/00-README

Study notes for a number of filesystem-related papers.

Primary sources for the classcial Multics and Unix SVR2 filesystems, BSD's FFS, Microsoft's FAT32 & NTFS, and Linux ext2/ext3 are throughly discussed.

##Material:

Some of the folders stated below also include their own README files.

Architecture/

Old and new specs of Intel and AMD x86(-64) CPUs. Closely related topics like the x86 'memory consistency model' are also included.

Manuals/

Official manuals for our development tools (e.g. gcc, and make). These official documents are usually more than enough; dumbed- down resources are disastrous for low-level development.

Notes/

Miscellaneous resources and self-written notes

Specs/

Specs of the 'hardware<->software' interface used by our kernel; examples include timers, interrupt controllers, and BIOS tables.

papers/

Historical and relatively new research that was needed while working on this interesting project. Detailed notes I've written while studying these papers are also included.

—Ahmed S. Darwish <[email protected]>