Chapter 10 Summary

This text introduced the main ideas in operating systems by studying one operating system, xv6, line by line. Some code lines embody the essence of the main ideas (e.g., context switching, user/kernel boundary, locks, etc.) and each line is important; other code lines provide an illustration of how to implement a particular operating system idea and could easily be done in different ways (e.g., a better algorithm for scheduling, better on-disk data structures to represent files, better logging to allow for concurrent transactions, etc.). All the ideas were illustrated in the context of one particular, very successful system call interface, the Unix interface, but those ideas carry over to the design of other operating systems.