OSF/1 Internals

This document is Volume I of the 'OSF/1 Internals' course binder, providing a deep technical introduction to the OSF/1 kernel. It is intended for technical staff at Digital Equipment Corporation and covers key architectural components, including:

• Module 1 (Introduction): Overview of OSF/1, its derivation from 4.3renoBSD, integration with the Mach kernel, support for parallel and distributed environments, and logical volume management.
• Module 2 (The Process Abstraction): Details on threading in OSF/1, including how UNIX process structures (proc/user) are adapted for multithreaded processes, system call implementations, synchronization primitives, and signal/exception handling.
• Module 3 (Messages and Ports): Examination of the Mach-based interprocess communication (IPC) mechanisms, including messages, ports as object references, and flow control.
• Module 4 (Virtual Memory): Explanation of the VM architecture, focusing on lazy evaluation, memory objects, external memory object managers (pagers), and the pmap module for handling architecture-dependent memory mapping.

The binder includes course objectives, module contents, student notes, and exercises to test understanding of the material.