RE: [ECOS] Recommended Multithreading books (off topic)

[Geoff Patch <grp at cea dot com dot au>]

Hi Trent,

> So, any recommended multithreading books out there that would help with
> my multithreaded applications under eCos?

The fundamental aspects of multithreaded application development are all 
covered by good operating system books. After all, operating systems 
(realtime or otherwise) are the mechanism that provide multithreading.

For excellent coverage of topics such as task management and interprocess 
communication I'd recommend the following books:

Two of the all-time academic classics in the field are:

"Operating Systems Design and Implementation"  Andrew S. Tanenbaum, 
Prentice-Hall 1987. This introduces the Minix operating system, which is a 
small unix for PC machines.

"Operating System Design - The Xinu Approach" Douglas Comer, Prentice-Hall 
1984. Introduces the Xinu operating system.

These really are essential reading for anyone in this game.  They're 
lucidly written and cover a wide range of topics.  Source code for both 
systems is included.

Another extremely useful book is "uC/OS The Real-Time Kernel", Jean J. 
Labrosse R&D Publications 1982. This is a book written by a practitioner 
for practitioners. It's a simple, easy to understand coverage of RTOS 
concepts, and includes the source for a full-featured RTOS that you can 
target to X86 machines.  I ported this RTOS to our 68302 based processor 
boards as a learning exercise, and found it to be a very instructive 
exercise.  Because this is specifically about RTOS (vs general purpose 
OS's) and very accessible I'd probably recommend it the most.  You can 
learn most of what you need to know about programming embedded systems from 
this book.


For a more general purpose book I'd recommend "Real-Time Systems Design and 
Analysis - An Engineers handbook" by Phillip A. LaPlante, IEEE Computer 
Society Press 1992.


Most of these books are fairly old, but they should still be available and 
are still relevant.  Fundamental concepts don't change.

I'd also be interested in emails from anybody else who has any 
recommendations in this area.

Hope This Helps


Geoff







------------------------------
Geoff Patch
Senior Software Engineer
CEA Technologies
Canberra Australia
02-6213 0141