Pilot (operating system)

Pilot
DeveloperXerox PARC
Written inMesa
Working stateHistoric
Initial release1981; 45 years ago (1981)
Available inEnglish
Supported platformsXerox Star workstations
Default
user interface		Graphical user interface

Pilot is a single-user, multitasking operating system designed by Xerox PARC in early 1977. Pilot was written in the Mesa programming language, totalling about 24,000 lines of code.[1]

Overview

Pilot was designed as a single user system in a highly networked environment of other Pilot systems, with interfaces designed for inter-process communication (IPC) across the network via the Pilot stream interface. Pilot combined virtual memory and file storage into one subsystem, and used the manager/kernel architecture for managing the system and its resources.

Its designers considered a non-preemptive multitasking model (run until blocked), but later chose a preemptive system based on monitors.[1] Pilot included a debugger, Co-Pilot, that could debug a frozen snapshot of the operating system, written to disk.

A typical Pilot workstation ran 3 operating systems at once on 3 different disk volumes : Co-Co-Pilot (a backup debugger in case the main operating system crashed), Co-Pilot (the main operating system, running under co-pilot and used to compile and bind programs) and an inferior copy of Pilot running in a third disk volume, that could be booted to run test programs (that might crash the main development environment).

The debugger was written to read and write variables for a program stored on a separate disk volume.

This architecture was unique because it allowed the developer to single-step even operating system code with semaphore locks, stored on an inferior disk volume. However, as the memory and source code of the D-series Xerox processors grew, the time to checkpoint and restore the operating system (known as a "world swap") grew very high. It could take 60-120 seconds to run just one line of code in the inferior operating system environment.

Eventually, a co-resident debugger was developed to take the place of Co-Pilot.[2]

Pilot was used as the operating system for the Xerox Star workstation.

See also

References

  1. ^ a b Lampson, Butler W.; David D. Redell (February 1980). "Experience with Processes and Monitors in Mesa" (PDF). Communications of the ACM. 23 (2): 105–117. doi:10.1145/358818.358824. Retrieved 2007-06-22.
  2. ^ Gillies, Donald W. "World-Stop Debuggers". Retrieved 2024-02-24.

Further reading

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