Talk:System generation

stuff removed

I'm not sure this is useful info.

(==System generation procedures==)

There is no "standard" procedure for sysgens on systems from different vendors. Sysgen procedures fall into at least three categories:

• Compile or assemble operating system kernel, nucleus, or supervisor. In this case other sysgen tasks such as building system libraries are usually manually performed. Systems using this procedure include:
  • Burroughs large systems Master Control Program (MCP). The Burroughs MCPs were written in a high-level ALGOL-like languages ESPOL or NEWP. The MCP is tailored by coding $OMIT conditional-compilation pragmas, which conditionally bypass compilation of specified pieces of code.
  • IBM System/360 Disk Operating System (DOS) was written in assembler. The systems programmer performing the sysgen codes macros specifying the desired options and assembles the supervisor.
  • Linux still provides this as an option, called tailoring the kernel. The Linux kernel is coded in C and it is possible to make source changes and rebuild the kernel.
• Some procedures accept a set of specifications and perform all the tasks necessary to build a tailored system.
  • IBM OS/360 had a two-step procedure called Stage I and Stage II. In Stage I the programmer specified the options for the system in a set of macros and assembled them. The output of Stage I was a job stream which contained the job control to perform all the necessary assemblies, link edits, and to create the required system libraries and copy the necessary modules into them.

Well, that might help explain it to newer readers familiar with configuring Linux kernels, and also helps keep it from being seen as IBM mainframe OS-specific. (As I remember, RSX-11 had a similar configuration mechanism, conditionally assembling parts of the supervisor.) Guy Harris (talk) 22:56, 23 June 2013 (UTC)