
The lead developer of a niche ARM-powered OS has
written a string of in-depth articles on the design, implementation and testing of a commercial operating system. Justin Fletcher was the architect of versions of 4 and 6 of RISC OS, the ARM processor's original operating system. Although his pieces will be best appreciated by RISC OS and Acorn users old and new, the series is a fantastic insight into operating system design: check out his
build system for compiling code into ROM images, the
abstraction of video graphics from a legacy 1980s-era kernel,
converting images on the fly,
testing and debugging, executing
applications and plenty more. Justin has
written tens of thousands of words and will be publishing new pieces daily online and in Android and iOS-friendly formats.
Member since:
2006-05-30
I'm not a great fan of the direction RISCOS went (I mostly used version 2.0 on the A3xx and A4xx lines at college, plus we had an A3000 at home, but I've use v3.7 and later and hated it.) But these articles at brilliant! Great find!