Looking for an AmigaOS technical manual

[Vanfanel]

Greetings fellow Amiga fans. It's been a long while since I've posted here last, but I have a question for you that Google just doesn't seem to be giving me the answer too.

This semester at college I'm taking a class on Operating Systems, and the term project is a presentation on an OS of my choice. Obviously, I'm going to pick the system I've loved since I started using it back in 1985. I need to find some sort of technical manual that describes the inner workings of the AmigaOS: the exec, AmigaDOS, Intuition, and the Workbench. Or at the least just the exec. While Wikipedia does have some decent info on AmigaOS, my instructor has something against using it as a reference. I already have the reference manuals that Commodore released back in 1986 for Intuition and the ROM kernel, but these are programming references, so I don't know how much information I'll be able to get from them. I'd prefer to have the book on the original 1.x version, but if there's something on a later version, I'll take that as well. Any direction you guys can point me in would be most welcome. Thanks.

Chris

[avanham]

The RKMs are pretty descriptive.  What is it that you are looking for exactly if not a programming reference?

[tone007]

Are you looking for the "Welcome to AmigaOS 1.3!" type manual?  That shouldn't be too hard to find.

[Vanfanel]

Details on the OS architecture and the system services. Things like the process descriptor, IPC, process creation and termination, scheduling and scheduling algorithms, how it handles deadlocks, memory management, and the like. Thanks.

Chris

[Trev]

Markus Wandel did all the work for you: http://wandel.ca/homepage/execdis/index.html

Exec doesn't handle deadlocks. It's a pretty dumb scheduler.

You can find the last RKMs at http://cataclysm.cx/random/amiga/reference. Inside, you'll find official explanations of how everything works.

[Vanfanel]

Disassemblies don't help me all that much, but the books may. Thanks.

I know about the scheduler myself. Didn't know that the system didn't handle deadlocks. What happens, it just gurus out?

[Trev]

I'm sure you've looked by now, but the disassembly is annotated and useful as a learning tool, assuming the annotations are accurate.

Long delayed-response, sorry. Nothing happens, it just deadlocks. The tasks involved are, to use the technical term, dead parrots.

[ncafferkey]

You might have seen it already, since it's linked from the Wikipedia Exec article, but this is a good article from Byte magazine: http://www.cunningham-lee.com/misc/amiga_exec.html (sorry, I can't figure out how to put a proper link in with the new interface).