The Design of the Unix Operating System

In this timely new book, Maurice J. Bach traces the popularity of the UNIX system throughout the computer industry. The author describes the internal algorithms and structures that form the basis of the operating system (the kernel) and their relationship to the programmer interface.

Among its key features, the book:

• Describes the outline of the kernel architecture
• Introduces the system buffer cache mechanism
• Includes data structures and algorithms used internally by the file system
• Covers the system calls that provide the user interface to the file system
• Defines the context of a process and investigates the internal kernel primitives that manipulate the process context
• Presents the system calls that control the process context
• Describes process scheduling
• Discussed memory management, including swapping and paging systems
• Outlines general driver interfaces, with specific discussion of disk drivers and terminal drivers
• Presents an overview of streams
• Introduces inter-process communication and networking, including System V messages, shared memory, and semaphores
• Explains tightly couples multiprocessor UNIX systems
• Investigates distributed UNIX systems