Guide to OSF/1

This book contains no attempt at the comparative analysis of operating systems or the critical assessment of OSF/1's strengths and weaknesses. It is rather intended to fill an immediate need for information: what is OSF/1? How is it being described by the people who developed it, and what promises and commitments for its future are being made by those people? We have attempted, as far as possible, to present the Open Software Foundation's own view of OSF/1, without interposing commentary of our own. In the rather politicized and competitive world of UNIX standards, there is value in allowing the major players to speak as clearly as possible, for all to hear and evaluate…

We offer here a technical synopsis. That means two things. First, it is indeed a synopsis, or overview; you will not find here a detailed exposition of operating system internals or design, such as you would want if you were beginning to port OSF/1 to a new platform. Second, the descriptions are, however, technical. They assume that you are already at least minimally familiar with the UNIX operating system and with general computing concepts and terminology.

With those caveats, let us tell you what we think the book does well. It gives you a good feel for the overall character of the OSF/1 operating system and explains a broad range of its distinctive features. It relates many of these features to traditional UNIX implementations, suggesting wherever possible why changes were desirable, It defines buzzwords and practices that are emerging in association with newer operating systems. And, perhaps most importantly, it serves as a tutorial, gently leading the non-specialist into a significant first acquaitance with extensible loaders and shared libraries, lazy evaluation and memory objects, POSIX threads and Mach messages.

This last deserves emphasis. While we said the book is technical, it is also true that it assumes as little as possible. We would like to think that — quite apart from its educational value with respect to a particular operating system — it is worth its asking price as a general introduction to some of those features soon to be commonplace in modern operating systems….

• Overview: OSF and OSF/1
• OSF/1 Architecture
• Tasks, Threads, and Processes
• Messages and Ports
• Virtual Memory
• Dynamic Device Configuration
• File Systems
• The Logical Volume Manager
• Security
• Programming Under OSF/1
• The Programming Environment
• The Loader
• Using Threads
• Internationalization
• Looking Ahead: What Is DCE?
• OSF White Papers
• Remote Procedure Cll in a Distributed Computing Environment
• Directory Services for a Distributed Computing Environment
• Security Services in a Distributed Computing Environment
• File Systems in a Distributed Computing Environment
• The OSF Distributed Management Environment
• An Analysis: OSF/1 and System V, Release 4

In reality, it is the overhead pictures and the accompanied text to these. Nothing to get excited about.