TOPSY
TOPSY (a Teachable OPerating SYstem ) is a multithreaded , very portable operating system, which was developed at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich at the Computer Engineering and Networks Laboratory.
The kernel is a multithreaded microkernel written by George Fankhauser in ISO-C , which is around 20 KB. TOPSY offers insights into the areas of concurrency , driver programming and operating system concepts and is therefore only used for teaching purposes. Although TOPSY is portable, the actual hardware-dependent implementation was originally written for the IDT MIPS R3052E platform . In various semester and diploma theses, TOPSY was upgraded to a PC-compatible ( Lukas Ruf and George Fankhauser ), Palm V ( Gabriele Giambonini and Lukas Ruf ), IXP1200 ( David Reist , Silvio Dragone , Boris Lutz , Claudio Jeker and Lukas Ruf ) and HP -iPAQ ( Thomas Brunner and Lukas Ruf) platform ported.
TOPSY is characterized by the following properties:
- Simplicity: In contrast to powerful kernels, TOPSY is deliberately kept simple. This is especially true for the algorithms as they are not optimized for speed.
- Readability: The operating system code is easy to read, only the minimum necessary hardware is supported
- Hardware independence: Since TOPSY is kept simple, porting to other systems is easier
- Transparency: The operating system is neatly written for learning purposes and not optimized for efficiency
Modern operating system concepts were implemented in Boris Lutz and Claudio Jeker's diploma thesis on TOPSY v3 under the direction of Lukas Ruf. TOPSY v3 supports u. a. following concepts:
- Prioritizable protection domains
- Network stack that can be dynamically assembled from components
- Reloading of components
- Efficient inter-protection domain communication
Teaching and research with TOPSY is supported by MIPS R3052E emulators. A platform-independent, Java-based emulator ( George Fankhauser ) and a modular C ++ -based (GNU C ++) ( Florian Kaufmann and Lukas Ruf ) optimized in terms of execution speed are available.
TOPSY is used in teaching at ETH Zurich and various universities in Europe and Australia. More than 70 pages of documentation and exercise materials are available. A mailing list and a wiki FAQ support the exchange of experiences.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Mailing list ( Memento of the original from May 29, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ FAQ ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
