The eXpFS logical file system comprises of files organized in a single directory called the root. The root is also treated conceptually as a file. As noted already, every eXpFS file is a sequence of words. Associated with each eXpFS file there are three attributes - name, size and type, each attribute being one word long. The file name must be a string. Each file must have a unique name. The size of the file will be the total number of words stored in the file. (The maximum size of a file is operating system dependent).

* In extended eXpOS, a file has two additional attributes, username and permission.

A data file is a sequence of words. The maximum number of words permissible in a file is defined by the constant MAX_FILE_SIZE. (It is a recommended programming convention to use the extension ".dat" for data files). eXpFS treats every file other than root and executable files (will be described later) as a data file. The Create system call automatically sets the file type field in the root entry for any file created through the create system call to DATA.

eXpOS allows an application program to perform the following operations (by invoking appropriate system calls) on data files: Create, Delete, Open, Close, Read, Write, Seek. Application programs can create only data files using the Create system call. In addition to this, data files may be loaded into the eXpFS file system using the external interface (see XFS Interface). A detailed specification of the file system calls is given here.

* In Multiuser implementation of eXpOS, the username of a data file corresponds to the user who creates the file. Its permission can be either exclusive (0) or open (1) according to the value specified by the user at the time of creating the file.

** If a data file is externally loaded into the file system (see XFS Interface), the owner field is set to root (value = 1) and the access permission is set to open access (value = 1).

These contain executable code for programs that can be loaded and run by the operating system. From the point of view of the eXpFS file system alone, executable files are just like data files except that file type is EXEC in the root entry. eXpFS specification does not allow executable files to be created by application programs. They can only be created externally and loaded using the external interface (see XFS Interface for XSM architecture.)

* In Multiuser implementation of eXpOS, the access permission field for executable files is not used (value = -1). By default, the owner of all excecutable files is set to 0 (kernel).< /p>

Executable files are essentially program files that must be loaded and run by the operating system. Hence the Operating system imposes certain structure on these files (called the executable file format). Moreover, the instructions must execute on the machine on which the OS is running. Thus, there is dependency on the hardware as well. Typically, an application program written in a high level language (like ExpL) is compiled using a compiler that generates the executable file. The compiler generates executable file that is dependent on the operating system as well as the target machine.

An OS implementation on a particular machine specifies an application binary interface (ABI). The eXpOS ABI for XSM machine is specified here.

Important Note: Application programs are typically written in a high level language like ExpL. A high level language implementation for an OS comes with an Application Programmers Interface (API) for the OS system calls. API describes the library functions which the application programs must invoke for each operating system call. The compiler will translate the library call to corresponding low level interrupt calls as specified in the ABI. Thus, application programmers need to know only API. A description of the ExpL programming language and eXpOS API are given. The ExpL compiler for eXpOS running on the XSM machine generates target code based on the ABI specification for eXpOS on XSM. Thus the ABI becomes the most important document for compiler back end design.

The executable file format recognized by eXpOS is called the Experimental executable file (XEXE) format. In this format, an executable file is divided into two sections. The first section is called header and the second section called the code (or text) section. The code section contains the program instructions. The header section contains information like the size of the text and data segments in the file, the space to be allocated for stack and heap areas when the program is loaded for execution etc. This information is used by the OS loader to map the file into a virtual address space and create a process in memory for executing the program.