KERNEL INITIALIZATION IN AN OPERATING SYSTEM DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION

Abstract

In this dissertation, design and implementation of kernel initialization phase to support virtual addressing with non-paging in an operating system has been proposed and implemented. This design is for Minix operating system, as it does not support virtual addressing. The underlying architecture is Intel 80x86, from 80386 onwards. To support virtual addressing in an operating system, paging unit of the underlying architecture must be enabled. Before enabling the paging unit, the initialization of page directory, page tables and memory handling data structures is required during booting of the system. A suitable mechanism is needed to perform this initialization phase. This dissertation is focusing on the design and implementation of this mechanism. The design does not support the paging i.e. swapping of pages and hence it is for virtual addressing with non-paging. Further, a method is proposed and implemented to increase the physical memory supported in Minix from 16 MB to the full available RAM.