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



At Mon, 22 Apr 2019 05:08:54 GMT, Mayuresh Kathe <mayuresh%sdf.org@localhost> wrote:
Subject: Re: netbsd : internals : bach book : good to start-off?
>
> i have no knowledge of any operating system internals, leave alone unix.
> so, since bach's book is so light (in terms of page count) and affordable
> i thought it would be a good starting-off point into operating system
> internals.

I think Bach's book is quite approachable for anyone who knows C, and it
is still a very good guide to the general principles of any Unix-like
monolithic kernel operating system.  I like Bach's writing style, and he
gives many examples of how various system services are used, as well as
describing how they are implemented.  Unfortunately it was written in
the middle of the Unix wars and at a time when the kernel in particular
was still mostly proprietary, so it doesn't include any actual code
examples from any Unix kernel and instead pseudo-code is presented to
describe kernel algorithms.

There is a actually a book that very nearly focuses on early NetBSD (and
FreeBSD, before they diverged so much), and that's McKusick, Bostic,
Karels, and Quarterman's "The Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD
Operating System", published 1996 by Addison-Wesley.  ISBN: 0201549794 /
ISBN-13: 9780201549799.  Used copies are available from Alibris.com for
a reasonable price.  I've found this edition to be better than the newer
FreeBSD-specific editions, at least from a NetBSD perspective, though it
is also somewhat more dated.

--
					Greg A. Woods <gwoods%acm.org@localhost>

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