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Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System, The 2nd Edition
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The most complete, authoritative technical guide to the FreeBSD kernel’s internal structure has now been extensively updated to cover all major improvements between Versions 5 and 11. Approximately one-third of this edition’s content is completely new, and another one-third has been extensively rewritten.
Three long-time FreeBSD project leaders begin with a concise overview of the FreeBSD kernel’s current design and implementation. Next, they cover the FreeBSD kernel from the system-call level down–from the interface to the kernel to the hardware. Explaining key design decisions, they detail the concepts, data structures, and algorithms used in implementing each significant system facility, including process management, security, virtual memory, the I/O system, filesystems, socket IPC, and networking.
This Second Edition
• Explains highly scalable and lightweight virtualization using FreeBSD jails, and virtual-machine acceleration with Xen and Virtio device paravirtualization
• Describes new security features such as Capsicum sandboxing and GELI cryptographic disk protection
• Fully covers NFSv4 and Open Solaris ZFS support
• Introduces FreeBSD’s enhanced volume management and new journaled soft updates
• Explains DTrace’s fine-grained process debugging/profiling
• Reflects major improvements to networking, wireless, and USB support
Readers can use this guide as both a working reference and an in-depth study of a leading contemporary, portable, open source operating system. Technical and sales support professionals will discover both FreeBSD’s capabilities and its limitations. Applications developers will learn how to effectively and efficiently interface with it; system administrators will learn how to maintain, tune, and configure it; and systems programmers will learn how to extend, enhance, and interface with it.
Marshall Kirk McKusick writes, consults, and teaches classes on UNIX- and BSD-related subjects. While at the University of California, Berkeley, he implemented the 4.2BSD fast filesystem. He was research computer scientist at the Berkeley Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG), overseeing development and release of 4.3BSD and 4.4BSD. He is a FreeBSD Foundation board member and a long-time FreeBSD committer. Twice president of the Usenix Association, he is also a member of ACM, IEEE, and AAAS.
George V. Neville-Neil hacks, writes, teaches, and consults on security, networking, and operating systems. A FreeBSD Foundation board member, he served on the FreeBSD Core Team for four years. Since 2004, he has written the “Kode Vicious” column for Queue and Communications of the ACM. He is vice chair of ACM’s Practitioner Board and a member of Usenix Association, ACM, IEEE, and AAAS.
Robert N.M. Watson is a University Lecturer in systems, security, and architecture in the Security Research Group at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory. He supervises advanced research in computer architecture, compilers, program analysis, operating systems, networking, and security. A FreeBSD Foundation board member, he served on the Core Team for ten years and has been a committer for fifteen years. He is a member of Usenix Association and ACM.
- ISBN-100321968972
- ISBN-13978-0321968975
- Edition2nd
- PublisherAddison-Wesley Professional
- Publication dateSeptember 5, 2014
- LanguageEnglish
- Dimensions6.75 x 2.15 x 9.55 inches
- Print length928 pages
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About the Author
Marshall Kirk McKusick writes books and articles, consults, and teaches classes on UNIX- and BSD-related subjects. While at the University of California at Berkeley, he implemented the 4.2BSD fast filesystem and was the Research Computer Scientist at the Berkeley Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG), overseeing the development and release of 4.3BSD and 4.4BSD. His particular areas of interest are the virtual-memory system and the filesystem. He earned his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from Cornell University and did his graduate work at the University of California at Berkeley, where he received master’s degrees in computer science and business administration, and a doctoral degree in computer science. He has twice been president of the board of the Usenix Association, is currently a member of the FreeBSD Foundation Board of Directors, a member of the editorial board of ACM’s Queue magazine, a senior member of the IEEE, and a member of the Usenix Association, ACM, and AAAS. In his spare time, he enjoys swimming, scuba diving, and wine collecting. The wine is stored in a specially constructed wine cellar (accessible from the Web at http://www.McKusick.com/cgi-bin/readhouse) in the basement of the house that he shares with Eric Allman, his partner of 35-and-some-odd years and husband since 2013.
George V. Neville-Neil hacks, writes, teaches, and consults in the areas of Security, Networking, and Operating Systems. Other areas of interest include embedded and real-time systems, network time protocols, and code spelunking. In 2007, he helped start the AsiaBSDCon series of conferences in Tokyo, Japan, and has served on the program committee every year since then. He is a member of the FreeBSD Foundation Board of Directors, and was a member of the FreeBSD Core Team for 4 years. Contributing broadly to open source, he is the lead developer on the Precision Time Protocol project (http://ptpd.sf.net) and the developer of the Packet Construction Set (http://pcs.sf.net). Since 2004, he has written a monthly column, ‘‘Kode Vicious,’’ that appears both in ACM’s Queue and Communications of the ACM. He serves on the editorial board of ACM’s Queue magazine, is vice-chair of ACM’s Practitioner Board, and is a member of the Usenix Association, ACM, IEEE, and AAAS. He earned his bachelor’s degree in computer science at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. He is an avid bicyclist, hiker, and traveler who has lived in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and Tokyo, Japan. He is currently based in Brooklyn, New York, where he lives with his husband, Kaz Senju.
Robert N.M. Watson is a University Lecturer in Systems, Security, and Architecture in the Security Research Group at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory. He supervises doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers in cross-layer research projects spanning computer architecture, compilers, program analysis, program transformation, operating systems, networking, and security. Dr. Watson is a member of the FreeBSD Foundation Board of Directors, was a member of the FreeBSD Core Team for 10 years, and has been a FreeBSD committer for 15 years. His open-source contributions include work on FreeBSD networking, security, and multiprocessing. Having grown up in Washington, D. C., he earned his undergraduate degree in Logic and Computation, with a double major in Computer Science, at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and then worked at a series of industrial research labs investigating computer security. He earned his doctoral degree at the University of Cambridge, where his graduate research was in extensible operating system access control. Dr. Watson and his wife Dr. Leigh Denault have lived in Cambridge, England, for 10 years.
Product details
- Publisher : Addison-Wesley Professional; 2nd edition (September 5, 2014)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 928 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0321968972
- ISBN-13 : 978-0321968975
- Item Weight : 2.7 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.75 x 2.15 x 9.55 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #574,576 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #4 in BSD Operating System
- #6 in Unix Administration
- #32 in Computer Operating Systems Theory
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read book recommendations and more.

George Neville-Neil works on networking and operating system code
for fun and profit. He also teaches various course on subjects
related to computer programming. His professional areas of interest
include code spelunking, operating systems, networking and security.
He is the co-author with Marshall Kirk McKusick of _The Design and
Implementaion of the FreeBSD operating system_ and is the columnist
behind ACM Queue's "Kode Vicious." Mr. Neville-Neil
earned his bachelor's degree in computer science at Northeastern
University in Boston, Massachusetts, and is a member of the ACM,
the Usenix Association and the IEEE. He is an avid bicyclist and
traveler who currently resides in New York City.

Dr. Marshall Kirk McKusick writes books and articles, teaches
classes on UNIX- and BSD-related subjects, and provides
expert-witness testimony on software patent, trade secret,
and copyright issues particularly those related to operating
systems and filesystems. He has been a developer and commiter
to the FreeBSD Project since its founding in 1993. While
at the University of California at Berkeley, he implemented
the 4.2BSD fast filesystem and was the Research Computer
Scientist at the Berkeley Computer Systems Research Group
(CSRG) overseeing the development and release of 4.3BSD and
4.4BSD. He earned his undergraduate degree in electrical
engineering from Cornell University and did his graduate
work at the University of California at Berkeley, where he
received master's degrees in computer science and business
administration and a doctoral degree in computer science.
He has twice been president of the board of the Usenix
Association, is currently a member of the FreeBSD Foundation
Board of Directors, a member of the editorial board of ACM's
Queue magazine, a senior member of the IEEE, and a member of
the Usenix Association, ACM, and AAAS.
In his spare time, he enjoys swimming, scuba diving, and
wine collecting. The wine is stored in a specially
constructed wine cellar (accessible from the Web at
http://www.mckusick.com/~mckusick/) in the basement of the
house that he shares with Eric Allman, his partner of
35-and-some-odd years and husband since 2013.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read book recommendations and more.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
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Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonCustomers say
Customers find the content excellent, great, and a good reference. They appreciate the detailed explanations of the internals of FreeBSD. Readers also say the book addresses their hunger for information well.
AI-generated from the text of customer reviews
Customers find the content excellent, a good reference, and a fantastic upgrade to a great book. They say it's a great update to the definitive text describing internal kernels. Readers also mention the writing style is clear and concise.
"...distributed digital form from FreeBSD.org but it’s such a lovely and complete book, it’s worth buying in digital AND print form...." Read more
"It's a reference book. Good for that purpose...." Read more
"Great book. If you can figure it out. I figured it out. The rest of you should probably just stick with Linux." Read more
"...the book despite the initial reaction, knowing that the content is actually great...." Read more
Customers find the book excellent at explaining the internals of FreeBSD. They say it's detailed and useful in understanding and comparing to other operating systems. Readers also appreciate the organization and structure of the book.
"...The topic coverage includes a lot of fundamental details that might be useful for understanding any free unix-like kernel, but most of the good..." Read more
"I love the organization of this book!..." Read more
"...some interesting problems and this book addressed this hunger for information quite well, with all its detailed explanations...." Read more
"...All though the book deals with FreeBSD it is useful in understanding and comparing to other operating systems." Read more
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Its worth noting that this book is not a generic OS design book. The focus of the book relates to FreeBSD-specific details. This book is also not really an exploration of POSIX or any other attempt to standardize system interfaces. This book is definitely not a programming guide....for that, I recommend "Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment" (aka APUE) which has coverage of BSD apis (as well as linux)...which is an excellent companion for this work.
I would like to see a perpetual electronic version of this book...on the back cover there was only a reference to free 45 day access. That is disappointing in 2014.
Haven't read it cover to cover or anything like that, so who knows, maybe its a pretty good read as well.
Between this and the Stevens "TCP/IP Illustrated" series, you've got good material.
If you're thinking about doing FreeBSD development, this is a must-have resource! So glad it's been updated!
If there's a kindle version made available I'll buy that too.
Now, some (hopefully constructive) criticism:
The book visual text layout style looks very unappealing at first, like a wall of text from my "System Software" teacher back in the school days. I've seen the preview and bought the book despite the initial reaction, knowing that the content is actually great. Would be nice to increase the variety of styling tools used (side notes such as when introducing a new word, interesting facts on the side, etc), similar to what you'd see in other school textbooks.
The organization seems a bit hard to follow: a lot of times, a topic is introduced, covered, and I feel deeply unsatisfied. Then another chapter later in the book would cover it deeper or from a different angle. Same goes for definitions: the term "superblock" was used 16 times before it was finally defined in 9.10, though I guess I could refer to a glossary.
A lot of figures are super hard to follow, and would need more explanation about what exactly is going on. For example, Figure 4.3 "Turnstile structures for blocked threads" made no sense to me no matter how hard I looked and how long I re-read the explanations. I loved the overall description on turnstiles though, thank you!
The whole section on network protocols seems vaguely applicable to FreeBSD kernel, though I wouldn't complain since it's free information. I happen to read a networking book in the past covering all the layers and I'm wondering there can be a balance in those chapters: introduce less details but keep enough of them so that the kernel operations still make sense to someone who doesn't have experience in networking. But then again, it's the first book that described Nagle algorithm in a way I could understand and I loved it. I don't know if any change is necessary, but that's the impression I got.
The print quality control seems to be poor: a few pages in my book are badly printed (very pale) and are hard to read for that reason. Not sure if a common occurrence, and I didn't feel like returning the book because hey, most of the pages are fine and I don't want to be wasteful.
Top reviews from other countries
Reviewed in Brazil on March 7, 2023
All this is well explained in the book. The book is largely academic in nature, but the material is presented in such a way that scholars and enthusiasts alike should be able to benefit greatly from it. The book is well suited for teaching computer science. It contains short exercises/questions covering the topics of the chapters.
The book discusses extremely useful things from the daily operation of UNIX operating systems, e.g. "Soft Updates", "Journaled Soft Updates", the functionality of both the UFS and ZFS file systems and many related things. But the importance of the state of file systems in operating systems can never be overestimated, as it is the part that keeps track of data and its handling on computer disks.
If something serious happens to the operating system's file system, there is always the risk of data loss. However, that risk must be considered at an absolute minimum on FreeBSD, whether with UFS or ZFS file system. Taking a backup is also an important safety measure in this context.
On p. 807-846 is a glossary of technical terms, a computer dictionary, but it is always useful to be familiar with various technical terms in the computer world.
The book is welcome for all those readers who want to deepen their understanding of the functionality of UNIX-based operating systems and get to know the infrastructure of UNIX systems.
Apenas llevo 2 capitulos, es tipo nivel avanzado y hay que releer ciertas partes para entender lo que quiere explicar el autor
Das vorliegende Buch The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System ist auf hohem Niveau geschrieben und besonders interessant für Studenten oder Fachleute, welche sich sowohl mit funktionalen, unixoiden Betriebssystemen im Allgemeinen als auch dem FreeBSD-System im Speziellen auseinandersetzen möchten. Das Buch verweist auf reichlich Sekundärliteratur und will definitiv gründlich (d.h. nicht an einem Nachmittag) gelesen werden. Aus meiner Sicht ist es daher kein Nachschlagewerk, sondern eines der wesentlichen Werke (weltweit) zur Erlangung eines weitergehenden, tieferen Verständnisses der Materie.
Aus den genannten Gründen empfehle ich dieses Buch auch uneingeschränkt für Administratoren, Engineers und Entwickler anderer unixoider Betriebssysteme wie z.B. GNU/Linux, OpenSolaris/Indiana oder anderer BSD-Systeme.








