Brian L. Stuart

News

• Just found an interesting issue running Inferno hosted under FreeBSD with CPU frequency scaling turned on. The issue an work-around are documented below.
• I've done some work on 9vx to support booting with a local Plan 9 partition as root. Here are the files you'll need to apply the changes.

Research and Creative Results

Book

• Course Technology has just published my text on operating systems. The title is Principles of Operating Systems: Design & Applications. In addition to the usual coverage of operating systems principles, this book includes a survey of nine existing OSs and in-depth examinations of Inferno and Linux. The ISBN is 1-4188-3769-5. You can order it on Amazon here as well as other on-line booksellers.

  Here are some sample pages from the book that give some idea of the flavor of it and that illustrate some thoughts on using it in the classroom:

  • Table of Contents and Preface
  • Excerpt from Principles of Memory Management
  • Excerpt from Memory Management in Inferno

  The publisher's page for the book is here. If you're interested in adopting the book for a course, you can order a desk copy and contact your sales rep there. The instructor's CD can be obtained from the sales rep.

• SIGCSE went well. Here's a picture of me at the display. (The display was the centerpiece of the Course Technology booth... surreal.) I met a lot of people who are very interested in the book. We gave out quite a few copies. I neglected to get a count of how many we started with, but there were 9 left when I went to the last session Friday. And, yes, some people did want me to sign it.

Thesis and Dissertation

• A General Purpose Multi-Processor Computer Architecture
• An Alternative Computational Model for Artificial Intelligence

Papers

• Fast Interpretation by Syntax Tree Traversal, Poster session, 6th Cumberland Conference on Graph Theory and Computing.
• Connect 4 as a Problem in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, SIGCSE Bulletin, Vol 26, No 2, June 1994, pp 41-46.
• Computer-Assisted Education via the World-Wide Web, Proceedings of the 34th Southeast ACM Conference, 1996.
• A Hyper-Text Tutorial Markup Language, Proceedings of the 35th Southeast ACM Conference, 1997.
• Relative Localization from Image Sequences, Proceedings of the 43rd Southeast ACM Conference, 2005.

Software

• C Programming Tutorial as described in "Computer-Assisted Education via the World-Wide Web"
• Hyper-Text Tutorial Markup Language This is the source for the HTTML processor on UNIX-like systems. If you're really interested, I have a version for older Macs.
• GMS - Gin Management System. This consulting project is available for those who want to use it as a software engineering case study. There's even a draft of a book on the subject. Contact me at stuartb@acm.org for more details.

Music

• Meditation-Piano solo sheet music (PDF) MP3
• Hope-Piano solo sheet music (PDF) MP3

Miscellaneous

• Brief Introduction to Electronic Analog Computers (HTML) (PostScript) (PDF)
• Random Thoughts: a blog

Plan 9

• Patches to support booting with a local Plan 9 partition as root

Inferno

• There is an issue when running Inferno hosted on FreeBSD and CPU frequency scaling is turned on. Under some circumstances, Inferno will lock up. While looking for a cause so that I could either fix Inferno or fix FreeBSD, I learned that FreeBSD has multiple CPU frequency scaling drivers which can work in combination. On my laptop, for example, there is the Intel Enhanced SpeedStep driver (est) and the Pentium 4 Thermal Control Circuitry driver (p4tcc). The est driver supports the speeds: 2001MHz, 2000MHz, 1600MHz, 1200MHz, and 800MHz. The p4tcc driver can modify these speeds by 100%, 75%, 62.5%, 50%, 37.5%, 25%, and 12.5%. The problem only seems to occur when the p4tcc driver is operating at something other than 100%. In other words, 1750MHz and 500MHz both lock up while 2001MHz and 800MHz don't appear to ever lock up. The work-around on my machine seems to be to force the clock to one of the frequencies supported by the est driver.
• Instructions for building hosted Inferno with Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition
• Instructions for building a native Inferno kernel for the PC
• Instructions for doing a full native Inferno install on a PC.

Education

• B.S. Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
• M.S. Electrical Engineering, Notre Dame University,
  - A General Purpose Multi-Processor Computer Architecture
• Ph.D. Computer Science, Purdue University,
  - An Alternative Computational Model for Artificial Intelligence

Course Material

• COMP4270/6270: Operating Systems
  Presentations:
  • Chapter 1
  • Chapter 3
  • Chapter 5
  • Chapter 7
  • Chapter 9
  • Chapter 11
  • Chapter 13
  • Chapter 15
  • Chapter 17
  • Chapter 19
  • Chapter 21
  • Chapter 22
• COMP4310/6310: Data Communications
• Courses taught at Rhodes College from 1991 to 1997
  • CS 195: Introduction to Computer Science
  • CS 295: Data Structures
  • CS 298: Software Analysis and Design
  • CS 392: Operating Systems
  • CS 394: Automata Theory
  • CS 397: Computer Organization and Assembly Language
  • CS 398: Compilers
  • CS 465: Topics in Computer History
  • Math 161: Discrete Mathematics I

AT&T 3B1/7300 (UNIX PC) Information

Stuff That Doesn't Fit Anywhere Else

• Went to Atlanta on vacation Fall '07. here are some pics.
• I'm going to see how it goes to record a few Random Thoughts in the blog world. If you are beyond bored, have a look.

Affiliations

• University of Memphis
• Association for Computing Machinery
• Bartlett United Methodist Church
• Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
• Notre Dame University
• Purdue University