As in earlier Addison-Wesley books on the UNIX-based BSD operating system, Kirk McKusick and George Neville-Neil deliver here the most comprehensive, up-to-date, and authoritative technical information on the internal structure of open source FreeBSD. Readers involved in technical and sales support can learn the capabilities and limitations of the system; applications developers can learn effectively and efficiently how to interface to the system; system administrators can learn how to maintain, tune, and configure the system; and systems programmers can learn how to extend, enhance, and interface to the system.The authors provide a concise overview of FreeBSD's design and implementation. Then, while explaining key design decisions, they detail the concepts, data structures, and algorithms used in implementing the systems facilities. As a result, readers can use this book as both a practical reference and an in-depth study of a contemporary, portable, open source operating system.This book: Details the many performance improvements in the virtual memory system Describes the new symmetric multiprocessor support Includes new sections on threads and their scheduling Introduces the new jail facility to ease the hosting of multiple domains Updates information on networking and interprocess communicationAlready widely used for Internet services and firewalls, high-availability servers, and general timesharing systems, the lean quality of FreeBSD also suits the growing area of embedded systems. Unlike Linux, FreeBSD does not require users to publicize any changes they make to the source code.
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Index Terms
- The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System
Recommendations
Diomidis Spinellis
The code of an operating system embodies all that makes systems programming a fascinating and exciting endeavor: the definition of interfaces and abstractions; the use of interesting algorithms and data structures; an unparalleled attention to reliability, efficiency, and scalability; and tight integration with hardware. It also includes innovative approaches for handling the problems of software stability, complexity, and portability. A book describing an operating system's design and implementation is destined to be a gold mine of practical and valuable knowledge; previous works of this genre, such as those by Organick [1], Lions [2], Bach [3], and Leffler et al. [4], have all, deservedly, become classics. McKusick and Neville-Neil's book describes the design and implementation of the FreeBSD 5.2 operating system. FreeBSD is a free open source operating system for a number of modern processor architectures. It is derived from BSD, the version of Unix developed by the Computer Science Research Group at the University of California, Berkeley. It is developed and maintained by a large, centrally managed team of individuals (including myself). FreeBSD offers advanced networking, performance, security, and compatibility features that are still missing in other operating systems, even some of the best commercial ones. Tempted by the system's quality, and the liberal license under which it is distributed, many companies have adopted FreeBSD for running their production servers, or for producing custom embedded systems. In addition to its adoption in mission critical applications, the system's academic pedigree has endowed FreeBSD with a culture promoting the development of cutting edge research features, and an exemplary development process. This book is an essential update on earlier books covering BSD systems, and now covers performance improvements in the virtual memory system, the new symmetric multiprocessor support, process threads, the operating system virtualization jail facility, and file system snapshots. Continuing in the style of its predecessors, the book successfully marries theory and practice. Each chapter introduces basic concepts, theory, and terminology before delving into design and implementation details. Many elements of FreeBSD are derivatives of cutting-edge academic research; the corresponding papers are always cited, making the book a valuable roadmap for the budding researcher. The book can serve a variety of purposes. First of all, it will be of interest to anyone wanting to understand the internal workings of a modern operating system. In addition, the book can be used as a textbook in advanced undergraduate or graduate operating systems courses, providing students with a chance to learn from a system that they can lay their hands on. Finally, those working on the FreeBSD kernel, for fun or profit, can use it as a comprehensive guide to the system's internals. In fact, the BSD community, to which this book is dedicated, should consider it a blessing to have the book at its disposal. Online Computing Reviews Service
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