The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System

by Marshall Kirk McKusick, George V. Neville-Neil

This title provides a concise overview of FreeBSD's design and implementation. While explaining key design decisions, it details the concepts, data structures, and algorithms used in implementing the systems facilities. It is both a practical reference and an in-depth study of a contemporary, portable, open source operating system.

Genres: Computer Science, Technology, Computers, Programming, Nonfiction, Reference, Technical

720 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 2004

About the author

Marshall Kirk McKusick is an American computer scientist known for his extensive contributions to BSD UNIX, from the early days of the system in the 1980s to ongoing work with FreeBSD. He served on the board of the USENIX Association from 1986 to 1992 and again from 2000 to 2006, holding the position of president from 1990 to 1992 and 2000 to 2002. He was a member of the editorial board of ACM Queue from 2002 to 2019 and served on the board of the FreeBSD Foundation from 2012 to 2022. Among colleagues and friends, he is known simply as "Kirk."
He earned a B.S. in electrical engineering from Cornell University, followed by two M.S. degrees and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley. His involvement with BSD began at Berkeley, where he shared an office with Bill Joy, one of the system's original architects. His most significant contributions have been in the area of file systems, particularly in the development of the Berkeley Fast File System (FFS). In the late 1990s, he introduced soft updates, which improved disk integrity following crashes or power failures, and later helped refine the Unix File System (UFS) into UFS2. A well-known Easter egg in UFS2 references his birthdate in its magic number definition.
McKusick was also instrumental in implementing filesystem snapshots and background fsck, which allow systems to recover quickly from unexpected shutdowns. His influence extends beyond technical contributions, as his Design and Implementation book series has been highly regarded in the field of computer science, shaping the development of BSD-based operating systems. Additionally, he holds the copyright for the BSD Daemon, the widely recognized mascot of BSD.
His published works include The Design and Implementation of the 4.3BSD UNIX Operating System and its successor volumes, co-authored with key BSD developers. He has also contributed essays on the history and evolution of BSD, such as Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix in Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution. His collaborations with George Neville-Neil and Robert Watson have resulted in definitive texts on FreeBSD's architecture and design.

Reviews

[Koen Crolla · Rating 4 out of 5]

Misleading title: this book is almost exclusively about the FreeBSD kernel, not the OS as a whole. The kernel isn't very interesting; for the most part, it's a bog standard Unix kernel, and the things it does differently can be described in about a dozen pages. Most of those things are really uninteresting (capsicum), not original to FreeBSD (DTrace), well-known to everyone because FreeBSD users won't shut up about them (jails), or all three (ZFS).
Still, if you're interested in the FreeBSD kernel, this is probably what you want to be reading.

[Ruslan Latypov · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book contains a bit outdated information, but still has some useful things e.g. description of tcp slow start implementation in the FreeBSD.

[Carter · Rating 5 out of 5]

The BSD line of Unix operating systems have been detailed for a long time in a series of books. BSD however quite sometime ago has moved to open source. The second edition of the book has a lot of rich technical information and is very well written. It includes a new ZFS section. This book isn't only about the kernel but key components of the operating system as whole. Overall I really liked it even though I skimmed some sections just to find key pieces of information I might need for a project I am working on using FreeBSD as a potential starting point.

[KerbenII]

mentioned in UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook (4th edition)

[Arnabjyoti Kalita · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you're building an OS from scratch, read it.

[Salim · Rating 5 out of 5]

After picking up Lions' commentary on UNIX, I also dusted off my copy of this detailed examination of FreeBSD. In particular I am reading the sections about the design of the kernel and process management.

[Conrad · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dry.

[Graham Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not going to pretend this is an easy book to get through. It's an information-dense guide to the FreeBSD kernel (not the whole OS as the title might suggest).