Unix Internals

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1. ssrcSep 2024
   I remember reading those books (ok, it was the 4.3 BSD edition instead of 4.4) alongside Bach's "The Design of the Unix Operating System" and Uresh Vahalia's "UNIX internals: the new frontiers" (1996). I recommend "UNIX internals". It's very good and not as well known as the others.
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2. rganesanJul 2023
   Though a bit dated, I highly recommend "The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD operating System". I have read several operating systems book classics including the book by Silbershatz and Galvin that you referred to and "Unix Internals" by Maurice Bach and the "Magic Garden Explained". I found the Design and Implementation of the BSD operating system much more readable and getting into details at just the right level.
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3. nbaksalyarMay 2022
   Although it's not a book, the Linux documentation [1] is actually very good and does the job of explaining design and architecture of the kernel.

   I'd also suggest reading "Unix Internals" by Uresh Vahalia. While this book is from 1995 and it doesn't cover Linux specifically, it's an exceptional resource for understanding how *nix kernels work in general.

   [1] https://docs.kernel.org/

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4. linguaeMar 2021
   There's a nice free OS textbook by Remzi and Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau named Three Easy Pieces (https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/), which was recently featured on this site (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26051386). There are some exercises from the textbook that use xv6.

   Here are some other nice OS textbooks from a Unix standpoint that I've used over the years whenever I need to study some aspect of Unix in depth:

   - The Design of the UNIX Operating System by Maurice Bach (1986)

   - The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System, 2nd Edition by McKusick, Neville-Neil, and Watson (2014)

   - UNIX Internals: The New Frontiers by Uresh Vahalia (1996) (note that this book covers the implementations of Unix variants that were contemporary in 1996)

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5. SomeoneNov 2020
   If you want to learn how operating systems work, you need very, very little computer science and math.

   A book such as “UNIX Internals” (https://www.amazon.com/UNIX-Internals-Frontiers-Uresh-Vahali...) should be a good start (just quickly browsed it. It seems it’s 100% free of formulas, supporting my claim you need very little math)

   Newer books probably exist (this book is almost 25 years old), but I don’t think that matters much. The details have changed (schedulers and allocators can get a lot more convoluted on modern systems with non uniform CPUs, hyper threading, etc., for example) and there’s some new stuff, for example in virtualization/hypervisors, but the core concepts haven’t changed, and that’s what learning how operating systems work book should start with.

   And yes, it only discusses UNIXes, so it ignores Windows, VMS and the like, but you have to start somewhere, and that book isn’t a bad start.

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6. jfbJan 2014
   In a response to the ZFS/FreeBSD VFS thread [1], I got to wondering, is there a modern (text)book on Unix internals, similar in scope to the excellent Unix Internals: The New Frontiers [2]? The Vahalia was scheduled for a second revision, but it never happened. Given that there are now fewer Unixes (if many more copies), and given how much Linux and Nextstep have evolved since 1996, it feels to me that the market could certainly bear an update.

   Pointers?

   [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7063993 [2] http://www.amazon.com/UNIX-Internals-The-New-Frontiers/dp/0131019082

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