Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD OS: 2nd edition available for preorder

http://www.amazon.com/Design-Implementation-FreeBSD-Operating-Edition/dp/0321968972/

by adamnemecek • 12 years ago

85 25 12 years ago

geekam2• 12 years ago

I want to start learning internals of nix systems. Is this a good book to start with? Or is there a book on Linux (or any other nix OS) that I should begin with?

JSno• 12 years ago

dont waste your time on BSD anymore. Linux dominates.

adamnemecek3• 12 years ago

You don't know what you are talking about.

stormqloud2• 12 years ago

So not true.

FreeBSD is a great server OS. With VM's hardware support gets less important for some use cases. IE LAMP.

The ports selection in FreeBSD is second to none. Linux has nothing close.

JuniperOS is retooled freebsd.

Lots of imbedded projects are based on BSD and always will be. The insanity of GPL licensing.

GPL3 is for activists and manifesto's. LGPL, GPL2 more then covered it for non activists.

ketralnis• 12 years ago

Oh I'm sorry, we'll all stop using our own favourite toys and start using your favourite toys.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

adamnemecek3• 12 years ago

That kind of depends on your background. I think that this book is recommended in some OS college courses as complementary reading since it describes a full blown OS and not some simpler OS that might be better suited for teaching purposes. You might want to find some OS college course that has materials available online, work through that and read this as you go along or when you are done with the course.

cperciva• 12 years ago

If you want to understand how operating systems work, this is a very good book to start with.

If you just want to learn enough to be able to use unix, look for something else. As the title says, this book is about design and implementation, not usage.

geekam2• 12 years ago

I want to understand how Operating Systems work. Thanks.

I did read the theory of OS by Silberschatz, Galvin et. al. I needed something that had more real-world orientation with source code references.

myg204• 12 years ago

I recommend the xv6 source and commentary. Here's the link: http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2012/xv6.html (has a pdf you can print out along with C code listing, and with nice references). It's very similar in idea to Lyon's commentary but with a more modern C code base.

matt_heimer2• 12 years ago

A little older but "The Magic Garden Explained: The Internals of UNIX System V Release 4, An Open Systems Design" is a really well written book for the core UNIX concepts.

hadoukenio• 12 years ago

First edition was a great book. For anyone interested in other OS dev books, I highly recommend:

  - Design and Implementation of the UNIX Operating System (Maurice J. Bach)
  - Modern Operating Systems (Andrew S. Tanenbaum)
  - Operating Systems Design and Implementation (Andrew S. Tanenbaum)
  - Linux Core Kernel Commentary (Scott Andrew Maxwell)

matt_heimer2• 12 years ago

Mr. Tanenbaum seems like a nice guy. I gave away a copy of Operating Systems Design and Implementation for my osdev website a couple years ago and asked him if he'd sign a copy if I sent it to him. He apologized for not having spare copies to give away and he paid to ship the book even though I told him I would.

wink• 12 years ago

Moreover there were hardly any tech books besides those 2 by Tanenbaum that I thorougly enjoyed reading as much. Not quite like a novel, but surely not as dry as usual.

Queue mildly relevant rant: I've never seen a German technical author hit the casual tone that American authors are a lot better at. Originally German tech books usually are as fun reading as manuals to a device and not entertaining at all...

kriro• 12 years ago

Or if you are a bit less technical "The Elements of Computing Systems". A very good book for the "I taught myself how to program and now I'm curious about OSdev" crowd.

[adding to the off topic rant: I generally agree but off the top of my head "Schrödinger programmiert Java" and the entire Schrödinger... series are decent and hit the typical US-style tone. Not sure if you count a programming book as a technical book though :)]

linhat• 12 years ago

The only non-FreeBSD systems I have to deal with by now are my Cellphone (Android) and my TV (funny enough, also Android). Made the switch from YOUR_FAVOURITE_LINUX_FLAVOUR after having to deal with (st)Ubuntu way too much at work.

Nonetheless, as much I prefer running FreeBSD on any kind of server system (as I have been for years), after using it on my (fairly new) laptop for a couple months now, I really wish there was better (new and shiny) hardware support (a commonly acknowledged FreeBSD deficiency, so yeah, I knew what I was getting myself into). Given, I only bought it because my old laptop was stolen at work, it belonging to the Haswell family did not really help (no internal WiFi [Intel IWN 7260], no hardware accelerated graphics [HD4400] and so forth...). But hey, who am I to complain, time to get hacking, which I suppose is more in the spirit of the BSD culture anyway and I'm not going back to NIX.

So yeah, glad this book got updated, most likely picking up this new edition...

Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD OS: 2nd edition available for preorder

Related Stories