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The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD OS

Posted by timothy on

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."

2 of 52 comments (clear)

  1. Itanic is a sinking by cipher+chort · · Score: 2, Insightful

    So falling $13B short of expected sales and shipping less than 6,000 units in Q2 is considered a success? The only vendor to ship over 300 units was HP. Compare that to say, Apple who shipped 13,000 Xserves, which arguably are the biggest competitor to Itanic in the clustering market for universities and super-computer centers. If we look at the Opteron, that shipped 60,000 (of course it's usually not a direct one to one vs. Itanic, but you get the idea).

    For over a decade of R&D and combine billions from Intel and HP, that has to be a major failure. Just the fact that they're adding 64bit extensions to Xeon shows you that Itanium is failing to gain the server market share that they planned on and now they have to plug the holes by beefing up their low-end server gear.

    Now comes news from IDF that HP is adding more Opteron kits to it's lineup with 4 way boxes and blades. Hmmm, that doesn't sound like a company that has faith in Itanium to me, and they were the second largest investor!

    There is of course the old saying "no one ever got fired for buying IBM", but I wonder if in a few years there won't be a rash of firings for "buying Intel" when Itanics platform support is still lagging terribly behind other architectures.

    --
    Someone is WRONG on the Internet!
  2. Re:I was considering this book by joshmccormack · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I just wish someone would make a linux distro that is more like OS X. It would bring Linux to the desktop faster and give grandma an interface she could easily understand.

    I don't really understand what you're talking about. Are you refering to the GUI? What about KDE? That's pretty easy to use.

    Do you mean software installs? I'm not a huge fan, as I like a package manager that can handle dependencies and help with uninstalling and such, as you're more likely to find in Linux/*BSD.

    And something being immediately understandable does not make it powerful. If anything, it can hinder it.