[luau] ics412: operating systems

[Dustin Cross]

Aloha,

This got me interested, so I started doing some reading.  BeOS is based on
a microkernel, written in C, everything else in the OS is done via servers
which were written in C++.  The servers are:

Application Server - provides the functionality for creating apps and their
associated windows and controls

Game Server - encompasses all the necessary functionality needed for
implementing games on OpenBeOS. This includes low-level graphics and high
performance sound playback

Input Server - the middle man between keyboard/mouse/pen tablet drivers and
applications. Events such as keystrokes and mouse clicks are received by
the Input Server which can then filter or process them before sending them
to the App Server which in turn forwards them on to the application

Media Server - concernced with reading, writing, and processing large
streams of data (audio/video, etc.). Emphasis is on high performance and
low latency. This is the realm of codecs (compression/decompression
engines), frames, samples, and buffering.

MIDI Server - implements support for generating, processing, and playing
music in MIDI format

Networking Server - implements all the low-level functionality needed for
network communications

Storage Server - provides programmatic access to any mounted file system.
This could be a disk-based file system such as BFS or a virtual file system

Printing Server - provides everything needed for printing

Be File System - The Be File System (BFS) is a kernel add-on: this means
that, while it is not in the kernel itself, it is still a low-level module
that interacts closely with hardware. The Be File System Protocol (FSP) is
a simple API that translates file system operations into kernel driver calls

Most of this information came from www.openbeos.org