XINU stands for Xinu Is Not Unix — although it shares concepts and even names with Unix, the internal design differs completely. Xinu is a small, elegant operating system that supports dynamic process creation, dynamic memory allocation, network communication, local and remote file systems, a shell, and device-independent I/O functions. The small size makes Xinu suitable for embedded environments.
The website looks content-free to me, apart from the small vague blurb quoted here.
I’d prefer not to have to buy a textbook, or download executable code, to have a sense of what’s in Xinu.
There’s code available for download.
The original PDP-11 Xinu book was the first technical book I read cover to cover, unable to put it down. I had just completed a large multitasking Z80 project that had touched on most of the areas covered by the book, so I was fascinated to compare my solutions with the authors.
Then the Internetworking with Xinu book came out a few years later, which covered IP. Came in handy several years later; I had a MicroVAX 2000 running bare silicon talking to an Ethernet thanks to it, many years before the Internet of Things was a thing.
Nowadays, of course, both are swept together into the single Xinu book.
I am, however, quite interested to see that, although Xinu rates an article, it doesn’t rate a headline.
You clearly didn’t read his post. He asked for info, not an executable or buying a book, yet you posted that he could download an executable or buy a book. I’d love to see more info as well. Maybe a link to a free online book about it. It doesn’t need to be the best book, merely something that will give us an idea of what xinu is without needing to spend $40 or setup a dedicated system to run xinu with no knowledge of what it even is.
The tarfiles include sources.
The web site is not lying about it being small. The variant that I poked through IAR comes out to about 40K of code.
Ah, okay. That’s not mentioned on the site. The sources are good for those of us who like to read source, but not quite as good for those who don’t. Thanks for the clarification.
This seems to be distinctly different from the Mt. Xinu BSD unix from the mid-80’s. The name being a pun on UNIX TM, AT&T’s trademark, since it was a BSD unix and not SYS V. Of most notable interest is their marketing poster showing a space scene with a fighter labelled Mt Xinu and 4.2 BSD destroying the “death star”, a.k.a AT&T’s logo: http://www.shrubbery.net/jokes/MtXinu42poster.jpg