Re: Ada Microkernel?

[Ted Dennison<dennison@telepath.com>]

In article <9hfvo1$sbd$1@nh.pace.co.uk>, Marin David Condic says...
>I can see I'm going to have to go get me a book or two on operating system
>theory and start yet another research endeavor to suck up those thousands of
>hours of free time I seem to have lately. :-) Anybody have a favorite?
>Possibly one that makes use of Ada - or is Ada-Cognizant? (Maybe something
>that talks about small real-time execs on up to full-blown distributed
>computing OS's?)


The one from my school days explicitly disclaims any intention of covering
RTOS's up front. Their rationale was that general purpose OS's and RTOS's have
design goals that are fundamentally incompatable. For example, an RTOS usually
can't allow time-slicing between equal priority tasks, while general-purpose
user OS's need to in order to achieve fairness in scheduling. Also, RTOS innards
must be carefully crafted to provide a short and determinstic response time.
However, that typically means fixed-length data structures, and thus limits on
resources that a multitasking user OS might find annoyingly constraining.

I'm curious if this is the unversal perception among OS developers today.

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