Re: netbsd : internals : bach book : good to start-off?

[Robert Elz <kre%munnari.OZ.AU@localhost>]

    Date:        Mon, 22 Apr 2019 04:34:44 GMT
    From:        Mayuresh Kathe <mayuresh%sdf.org@localhost>
    Message-ID:  <201904220434.x3M4YicI026507%sdf.org@localhost>

  | just nitpicking, isn't bach's book reasonable enough for unix internals? :)

You think there is just one "unix" to have internals?   Or that they are
all really similar, or something?

As I recall (it has been a long time since I looked, but I think I
have a copy of that one, or some edition of it anyway somewhere) Bach's
book mostly describes System V.

Even in the early 90's (in the vintage of McKusick's 4.3BSD book)
System V and BSD had diverged quite a lot internally.

In the decades since, even moreso.   There is (that I know of anyway)
no book that will come really close to describing NetBSD internals,
with all the bus_map and mem management (incl UVM), and locking, and ...
that are more or less unique to NetBSD - and yet are all fundamental
to a true understanding of the internals.

Even McKusick's FreeBSD book (as similar aas FreeBSD is to NetBSD in
some ways) will contain much that is not relevant to NetBSD (including
soft mounts, and all related to that) and be lacking much, but it
is going to be much closer to NetBSD and so get you further than Bach's
book would.

But if all you want is a guide to how some arbitrary unix system might
be implemented, or if you really want to know SysV internals, then yes,
that one should be just fine.

kre

ps: if you're really looking for a user or programmer's guide, then you
want something quite different.