Customer Reviews

Solaris™ Internals (Vol 1)

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

While taking the Sun Solaris Internals class, a pre-publication copy of this book was floating around the classroom. Of course I latched on and read as much of it as I could and was very impressed with the depth and amount of useful information contained in this book It simply is the best resource on Solaris Internals that I have ever read.

I finally received my own copy after 6 months of waiting, and am one happy camper. If you are a Solaris kernel developer, system admin, performance analysts, or kernel debugger, this is a must-have book. Almost all aspects of Solaris are covered with the exception of device drivers and low-level I/O.

My only complaints are the length of time it took to release the book, it does not cover Solaris 8, and page 108 is missing.

Solaris Internals is a must read for system programmers and anyone interested in Operating System Design. The book is loaded with important information and splendidly organized into 4 major sections. Each section is well thought out and walks you from subject to subject, with serious technical depth. I found myself writing test programs throughout the book and am certain I've learned a great many things.

Part One deals with traps, interrupts, callouts, contexts, and lock primitives and goes where the Sparc/SparcV9 Architecture Manuals did not.

My favorite section was Part Two (Solaris Memory System), it left me with a clear understanding of _everything_ related to memory: HAT, TSB's, TLB, MMU, phys mem organization, page table hashing, paging, page scanner, address spaces and segments, seg drivers, slab allocator, watchpoints, multiple page sizing, memory managment strats, to name a few subjects...

Part Three deals with threads, processes, and IPC. It has a large and very useful section on the Kernel Dispatcher and scheduling.

Part Four deals with everything 'file system'; DNLC, pn lookups, mmap, direct io, aio, fs cache, vnodes, vfs, etc. It contains useful details of useful Solaris features, which are easy to overlook in system manual pages.

Finally, Solaris Internals contains many data structure diagrams, charts, and tables -- the diagrams alone are enough to make the book useful!

A well written and _useful_ book ;)

--joey

When my Sun SE showed up with a copy of "Solaris Internals," he immediately went to the top of my "favorite vendor contacts" list (right above the sales guy with the Starfire jackets). Mauro's "Solaris Internals" is a worthy addition to a distinguished line of Unix analyses (Goodheart and Cox; Vahalia; and, of course, Bach).

Mauro's "Sunworld" columns have gained fame for their clarity and brevity, often showing up as Sun technical whitepapers. "Internals" continues this tradition by providing straightforward discussions of hardware memory management, process dispatching, shared memory, OS caches (such as the much-maligned DNLC), and many other topics. This is the sort of information that you would otherwise have to infer from SunSolve bug reports (an exercise that makes litigating Florida election laws look trivial).

Those looking for cookbook solutions won't find this book to be of much help -- though Mauro often provides concrete advice amongst the abstractions, the book is dedicated largely to the sort of subtleties that dissertations are made of. Cockcroft and Wong are probably better choices for "in the trenches" sysadmin advice. But, if you're willing to invest the time and effort (and it's a *lot* of both!), Mauro's is as good an analysis as you will find.

There are no other books in print that can give you the specifics of Solaris in such detail as this one. If you are developing software for the Solaris platform this book will give you a greater understanding of how Solaris works internally. I know... Reading a book on OS Internals can be a bit dry at times, but this book is truly a great companion to Unix Internals, The Design of the 4.4 BSD Operating System, and The Design of the UNIX Operating System and belongs on the bookshelf of any self respecting UNIX geek.

Highest recommendation.

This book will teach you everything you want to know about Solaris. It is an excellent Operating Systems book and can be used as a reference or text. It digs into the guts of the kernel and intimately presents the fine details of Solaris operation.

Very nicely written book. It's hard though sometimes to understand, and sometimes difficult to follow as the author does not sometimes follow a logical and gradual approach in explaining the topic, like in the case of VMM. However, the book is a must have for someone interested in knowing how Solaris works. If you are able to understand the book cover to cover, you can claim full understanding of Solaris Internals.

While I am not a programmer I loved this book on what makes Solaris tick. As a sysadmin the book covered more details on memory, filesystems and internals to the OS than anything I've seen before. Plus its a great brain teaser for Solaris stuff to stump interview candidates!

Not too dry to read like some other OS design books. Is for Solaris what "Inside Windows NT" and "Design and Implementation of BSD4.4" are for their respective OS's. Very eye opening as to why Solaris has no trouble scaling up to many processors, and throws in some useful, practical tricks to boot.

This book with me since 6 months and I'm reading it from time to time when I want to understand something internally inside Solaris. I recommended this book for system engineers those wants to understand Solaris from inside out.

This is the ONLY book I've ever rated 5 stars. It has to be the most depth-filled book ever to come out of SMI (although Adrian Cockroft offers some competition in the tuning book).

It is not for the faint of heart, however. The book is meat only--no "history of the internet" chapters and no assumption about the audience's inability to comprehend. If there ever is a "for gurus" series to mirror the "for dummies" series, this book will be included as a ground-breaking first.