The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD OS

n0dez writes "Peter H. Salus has written a review of The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System on UnixReview. "If you need to understand just how a kernel works, you need this book. McKusick and Neville-Neil have done the community a favor, and this book deserves to be a best seller." This book is an update to The Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD Operating System by Marshall Kirk McKusick."

Comments

Re:uhh..

[Money for Nothin']

I don't know about this new FreeBSD-specific book, but the previous 4.4BSD book (also by McKusick, etc.) was a combination of code and design explanation. I didn't read the whole thing, but I used much of the book for a term paper about FreeBSD's design a year ago, and probably 80% or so of the book was design info, not code.

That makes sense too -- after all, the code is bound to be changed sooner or later, making the book out of date, even though the same design principles may be in-use. This was a good move on McKusick's & Co's part, b/c much of the information they published back in 1996 still applies even today to FreeBSD 5.x (that said, 5.x is definitely a major change, particularly w.r.t. the process scheduler).

Go to a university library if you want to find a copy without buying it. Most normal public libraries won't have a copy (alternatively, you can hang out at Borders or Barnes and Noble and browse through it there).

Speaking from experience though, if you want a "book that explains the guts" without forcing you to read reams of code (and why would you? The source is available online for free to read instead!), then you want McKusick, etc.'s book (I imagine this new FreeBSD-specific book is similar to the 4.4BSD book).

I looked hard (as in, for the better part of a semester) -- there simply is not a more-comprehensive BSD OS-design reference anywhere. And yes, I got an 'A' on my paper (updated from the 4.4BSD's era to include FreeBSD-specific info, including through FBSD-5.1, however). :)

Re:uhh..

[Calvinhood]

For the most part the book presents the organization and major algorithms used in FreeBSD, and then presents the theory and rational behind the choice. It also presents some alternative implementations that could have been used and explains why they weren't.

As far as code, I don't think there's a single line of it in the book.

Re:NeXTish

[Guy Harris]

I saw it in a "complete family tree of UNIX", which I'm furiously trying to locate.

This one? If so, note that the OS X Server releases starting with the one labeled "Mac OS X Server 10.0.3" have arrows from the OS X client line. The earlier OS X Server releases didn't have an Aqua GUI - they had a more Mac-like GUI (more Rhapsody-derived).

I also found http://www.macintouch.com/mxs.html which near the very top is talking about how the interface is heavily NeXT and not like traditional Mac OS, granted it's quite old information

Exactly. It's talking about one of the old OS X server 1.x releases that came out before the client OS X 10.0.

but that tends to confirm what I gathered informally from other sources.

Perhaps those other sources think OS X Server is still more like the older 1.x releases, without all the stuff added on the client side since then, including the Aqua GUI (or are old source from when it was one of the older 1.x releases).

but it seems (again, from informal observation) that the consumer version is much more FreeBSDish and the server version is much more Machish

The Mach stuff that's generally visible is mainly the object file format; that stuff is present in both client and server, as is the Mach+BSD kernel (/mach_kernel) and Mach-related user-mode servers such as mach_init. What stuff have you observed that shows the client being "more FreeBSDish" and the server ("server" meaning "server with the same version as the client", e.g. if your client is 10.3[.x], the server should be another 10.3 version, not one of the really old servers) being "more Machish"?