These are the collected Rules of Professor
Bart Miller.
Primarly things that he repeats or prefaces with "
This is important."
The names of the rules have been designated by Caitlin.
All of these rules applied in the context of the lectures given;
no guarantee that they'll apply for you.
- Bart's rule of interrupts
- The only way to enter an operating system is through an interrupt.
- Bart's rule of binary semaphores
- In general, initialize a binary semaphore to one.
- Bart's rule of condition variables
- Condition variables are always private.
- Bart's rule of power
- Two mechanisms have equal power if you can implement one in terms of
the other and vice versa.
- Corollary
- Power is expressiveness or logical equivalence. Power is not
efficiency.
- Bart's rule of brain cell usage
- You only have so many brain cells. You may choose to kill them by
thinking, or you may choose to kill them with beer.
- Corollary
- Minimize the number of brain cells spent thinking.
- Erik's Selection
-
- Vodka kills the weak brain cells, so you're left with the strong
smarter ones
- Mark's comment on Erik's Selection
- Gin targets the pacifist brain cells,
leaving only the mean ones behind
-
- Bart's rule of pointcast
- Don't run pointcast.
- Bart's rule of scheduling
- If you can't tell, it doesn't matter.
- Bart's rule of critical sections
- Never block in a critical section.
- Bart's rule of global variables
- Global variables are evil.
- Corollary A
- Never, never use public data members.
- Corollary B
- If you think you need
public data members,
see Corollary A
- Bart's rule of pages
- Variable length things are evil.
- Bart's rule of virtual memory
- There is no relationship between the size of the virtual address and
the size of the physical address.
- Bart's rule of trace files
- A trace file never gives you the information you want.