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Exec (Amiga)
Exec is the kernel of AmigaOS. It is a 13 KB multitasking microkernel which enabled pre-emptive multitasking in as little as 256 KB of memory (as supplied with the first Amiga 1000s). Exec provided functions for multitasking, memory management, and handling of interrupts and dynamic shared libraries. It acts as a scheduler for tasks running on the system, providing pre-emptive multitasking with prioritized round-robin scheduling. Exec also provides access to other libraries and high-level inter-process communication via message passing. Other comparable microkernels have had performance problems because of the need to copy messages between address spaces. Since the Amiga has only one address space, Exec message passing is quite efficient. The only fixed memory address in the Amiga software (address 4) is a pointer to exec.library, which can then be used to access other libraries. Exec was designed and implemented by Carl Sassenrath. Exec Unlike newer modern operating ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Carl Sassenrath
Carl Sassenrath (born 1957 in California) is an architect of operating systems and computer languages. He brought multitasking to personal computers in 1985 with the creation of the Amiga, Amiga Computer operating system kernel, and he is the designer of the REBOL computer language, REBOL/IOS collaboration environment, the Safeworlds AltME private messaging system, and other products. Carl is currently a Principal Engineer at Roku, Inc. Background Carl Sassenrath was born in 1957 to Charles and Carolyn Sassenrath in California. His father was a chemical engineer involved in research and development related to petroleum refining, paper production, and air pollution control systems. In the late 1960s his family relocated from the San Francisco Bay Area to the small town of Eureka, California. From his early childhood Sassenrath was actively involved in electronics, amateur radio, photography, and filmmaking. When he was 13, Sassenrath began working for KEET, a PBS public broadca ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Memory Management
Memory management is a form of resource management applied to computer memory. The essential requirement of memory management is to provide ways to dynamically allocate portions of memory to programs at their request, and free it for reuse when no longer needed. This is critical to any advanced computer system where more than a single process might be underway at any time. Several methods have been devised that increase the effectiveness of memory management. Virtual memory systems separate the memory addresses used by a process from actual physical addresses, allowing separation of processes and increasing the size of the virtual address space beyond the available amount of RAM using paging or swapping to secondary storage. The quality of the virtual memory manager can have an extensive effect on overall system performance. In some operating systems, e.g. OS/360 and successors, memory is managed by the operating system. In other operating systems, e.g. Unix-like operating sy ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Motorola 68000
The Motorola 68000 (sometimes shortened to Motorola 68k or m68k and usually pronounced "sixty-eight-thousand") is a 16/32-bit complex instruction set computer (CISC) microprocessor, introduced in 1979 by Motorola Semiconductor Products Sector. The design implements a 32-bit instruction set, with 32-bit registers and a 16-bit internal data bus. The address bus is 24 bits and does not use memory segmentation, which made it easier to program for. Internally, it uses a 16-bit data arithmetic logic unit (ALU) and two more 16-bit ALUs used mostly for addresses, and has a 16-bit external data bus. For this reason, Motorola termed it a 16/32-bit processor. As one of the first widely available processors with a 32-bit instruction set, and running at relatively high speeds for the era, the 68k was a popular design through the 1980s. It was widely used in a new generation of personal computers with graphical user interfaces, including the Macintosh 128K, Amiga, Atari ST, and X68000. Th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Operating System
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also include accounting software for cost allocation of processor time, mass storage, printing, and other resources. For hardware functions such as input and output and memory allocation, the operating system acts as an intermediary between programs and the computer hardware, although the application code is usually executed directly by the hardware and frequently makes system calls to an OS function or is interrupted by it. Operating systems are found on many devices that contain a computer from cellular phones and video game consoles to web servers and supercomputers. The dominant general-purpose personal computer operating system is Microsoft Windows with a market share of around 74.99%. macOS by Apple Inc. is in second place (14.84%), and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Address Space
In computing, an address space defines a range of discrete addresses, each of which may correspond to a network host, peripheral device, disk sector, a memory cell or other logical or physical entity. For software programs to save and retrieve stored data, each datum must have an address where it can be located. The number of address spaces available depends on the underlying address structure, which is usually limited by the computer architecture being used. Often an address space in a system with virtual memory corresponds to a highest level translation table, e.g., a segment table in IBM System/370. Address spaces are created by combining enough uniquely identified qualifiers to make an address unambiguous within the address space. For a person's physical address, the ''address space'' would be a combination of locations, such as a neighborhood, town, city, or country. Some elements of a data address space may be the same, but if any element in the address is different, addres ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Message Passing
In computer science, message passing is a technique for invoking behavior (i.e., running a program) on a computer. The invoking program sends a message to a process (which may be an actor or object) and relies on that process and its supporting infrastructure to then select and run some appropriate code. Message passing differs from conventional programming where a process, subroutine, or function is directly invoked by name. Message passing is key to some models of concurrency and object-oriented programming. Message passing is ubiquitous in modern computer software. It is used as a way for the objects that make up a program to work with each other and as a means for objects and systems running on different computers (e.g., the Internet) to interact. Message passing may be implemented by various mechanisms, including channels. Overview Message passing is a technique for invoking behavior (i.e., running a program) on a computer. In contrast to the traditional technique of callin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Inter-process Communication
In computer science, inter-process communication or interprocess communication (IPC) refers specifically to the mechanisms an operating system provides to allow the processes to manage shared data. Typically, applications can use IPC, categorized as clients and servers, where the client requests data and the server responds to client requests. Many applications are both clients and servers, as commonly seen in distributed computing. IPC is very important to the design process for microkernels and nanokernels, which reduce the number of functionalities provided by the kernel. Those functionalities are then obtained by communicating with servers via IPC, leading to a large increase in communication when compared to a regular monolithic kernel. IPC interfaces generally encompass variable analytic framework structures. These processes ensure compatibility between the multi-vector protocols upon which IPC models rely. An IPC mechanism is either synchronous or asynchronous. Synchr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Library (computing)
In computer science, a library is a collection of non-volatile memory, non-volatile resources used by computer programs, often for software development. These may include configuration data, documentation, help data, message templates, Code reuse, pre-written code and subroutines, Class (computer science), classes, Value (computer science), values or Data type, type specifications. In OS/360 and successors, IBM's OS/360 and its successors they are referred to as Data set (IBM mainframe)#Partitioned datasets, partitioned data sets. A library is also a collection of implementations of behavior, written in terms of a language, that has a well-defined interface (computing), interface by which the behavior is invoked. For instance, people who want to write a higher-level program can use a library to make system calls instead of implementing those system calls over and over again. In addition, the behavior is provided for reuse by multiple independent programs. A program invokes the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Round-robin Scheduling
Round-robin (RR) is one of the algorithms employed by process and network schedulers in computing.Guowang Miao, Jens Zander, Ki Won Sung, and Ben Slimane, Fundamentals of Mobile Data Networks, Cambridge University Press, , 2016. As the term is generally used, time slices (also known as time quanta) are assigned to each process in equal portions and in circular order, handling all processes without priority (also known as cyclic executive). Round-robin scheduling is simple, easy to implement, and starvation-free. Round-robin scheduling can be applied to other scheduling problems, such as data packet scheduling in computer networks. It is an operating system concept. The name of the algorithm comes from the round-robin principle known from other fields, where each person takes an equal share of something in turn. Process scheduling To schedule processes fairly, a round-robin scheduler generally employs time-sharing, giving each job a time slot or ''quantum'' (its allowance ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Scheduling (computing)
In computing, scheduling is the action of assigning ''resources'' to perform ''tasks''. The ''resources'' may be processors, network links or expansion cards. The ''tasks'' may be threads, processes or data flows. The scheduling activity is carried out by a process called scheduler. Schedulers are often designed so as to keep all computer resources busy (as in load balancing), allow multiple users to share system resources effectively, or to achieve a target quality-of-service. Scheduling is fundamental to computation itself, and an intrinsic part of the execution model of a computer system; the concept of scheduling makes it possible to have computer multitasking with a single central processing unit (CPU). Goals A scheduler may aim at one or more goals, for example: * maximizing ''throughput'' (the total amount of work completed per time unit); * minimizing '' wait time'' (time from work becoming ready until the first point it begins execution); * minimizing '' latency ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Byte (magazine)
''Byte'' (stylized as ''BYTE'') was a microcomputer magazine, influential in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s because of its wide-ranging editorial coverage. "''Byte'' magazine, the leading publication serving the homebrew market ..." ''Byte'' started in 1975, shortly after the first personal computers appeared as kits advertised in the back of electronics magazines. ''Byte'' was published monthly, with an initial yearly subscription price of $10. Whereas many magazines were dedicated to specific systems or the home or business users' perspective, ''Byte'' covered developments in the entire field of "small computers and software", and sometimes other computing fields such as supercomputers and high-reliability computing. Coverage was in-depth with much technical detail, rather than user-oriented. The company was purchased by McGraw-Hill in 1979, a watershed event that led to the rapid purchase of many of the early computer magazines by larger publishers. By this time t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
McGraw-Hill
McGraw Hill is an American educational publishing company and one of the "big three" educational publishers that publishes educational content, software, and services for pre-K through postgraduate education. The company also publishes reference and trade publications for the medical, business, and engineering professions. McGraw Hill operates in 28 countries, has about 4,000 employees globally, and offers products and services to about 140 countries in about 60 languages. Formerly a division of The McGraw Hill Companies (later renamed McGraw Hill Financial, now S&P Global), McGraw Hill Education was divested and acquired by Apollo Global Management in March 2013 for $2.4 billion in cash. McGraw Hill was sold in 2021 to Platinum Equity for $4.5 billion. Corporate History McGraw Hill was founded in 1888 when James H. McGraw, co-founder of the company, purchased the ''American Journal of Railway Appliances''. He continued to add further publications, eventually establishing The ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
