4 ms·

> Similarly for your "kernel preemption. A blocking mutex and a spinlock". Again I can guess, but I doubt that your terminology is both well defined and common.

by strlen 16y ago

> Similarly for your "kernel preemption. A blocking mutex and a spinlock". Again I can guess, but I doubt that your terminology is both well defined and common. Really? That's standard terminology and I could define both in few sentences and could fresh out of college. I don't do OS development (and while I've tweaked a few lines in the kernel source, I'm not a kernel hacker by any means), but I understand the differences between spinlocks, event loops and blocking on mutexes (it's a core part of userland systems/network programming). I highly suggest picking up Andy Tannenbaum's "Modern Operating Systems" (the MINIX book is excellent too, but is more about "the right way" to build an OS with a microkernel etc... rather than a case study of what exists). It's accessible and meant as an undergraduate text and will give you at least a cursory overview of these issues. It just seems like you had a bad professor for your operating systems course.

HilbertSpace 16y ago
I've taught computer science in ugrad and grad school but only took one course, that AFTER I taught the ugrad course, and it was a silly course. I know more than I indicated, but I wanted to say that the questions need to be more clear, Yes, preemptive is like handling a keyboard interrupt. Mutex likely stands for 'mutual exclusion' and typically is supported by a library with various features. Spin locks were an old IBM trick where it actually was faster to let a 'task' just go into a loop on something than use something like a Mutex that would involve the dispatcher -- the dispatcher could be slow. But spin locks had a bad reputation for spinning forever and were a standard system managment problem. I'd advise the hiring guy first to get a book, maybe like you listed, and go to a university with a good CS department and buy a hour with a good OS CS prof and get an outline of what he needed to hire.

by strlen 16y ago

HilbertSpace 16y ago

I've taught computer science in ugrad and grad school but only took one course, that AFTER I taught the ugrad course, and it was a silly course. I know more than I indicated, but I wanted to say that the questions need to be more clear, Yes, preemptive is like handling a keyboard interrupt. Mutex likely stands for 'mutual exclusion' and typically is supported by a library with various features. Spin locks were an old IBM trick where it actually was faster to let a 'task' just go into a loop on something than use something like a Mutex that would involve the dispatcher -- the dispatcher could be slow. But spin locks had a bad reputation for spinning forever and were a standard system managment problem. I'd advise the hiring guy first to get a book, maybe like you listed, and go to a university with a good CS department and buy a hour with a good OS CS prof and get an outline of what he needed to hire.