The Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD Operating System

by Marshall Kirk McKusick, Keith Bostic, Michael J. Karels

This book describes the design and implementation of the BSD operating system - previously known as the Berkeley version of UNIX. Today, BSD is found in nearly every variant of UNIX, and is widely used for Internet services and firewalls, timesharing, and multiprocessing systems. Readers involved in technical and sales support can learn the capabilities and limitations of the system; applications developers can learn effectively and efficiently how to interface to the system; systems programmers can learn how to maintain, tune, and extend the system. Written from the unique perspective of the system's architects, this book delivers the most comprehensive, up-to-date, and authoritative technical information on the internal structure of the latest BSD system.
As in the previous book on 4.3BSD (with Samuel Leffler), the authors first update the history and goals of the BSD system. Next they provide a coherent overview of its design and implementation. Then, while explaining key design decisions, they detail the concepts, data structures, and algorithms used in implementing the system's facilities. As an in-depth study of a contemporary, portable operating system, or as a practical reference, readers will appreciate the wealth of insight and guidance contained in this book.

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

580 pages, Hardcover

First published April 30, 1996

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

[Max Lybbert · Rating 4 out of 5]

This textbook is something of a classic in the field, and is engaging enough to read in your free time. There were some passages that I thought a good editor could have tightened up, but overall it's an enjoyable book. Regardless of whether you've taken a class on operating systems, I believe you can benefit from reading about the design of 4.4 BSD. And used copies are easy enough to find at a decent price.

Additionally, I can't help but notice that this book was published in 1996. I remember hearing that it was possible to get "free operating systems" on the Internet back then, but I never truly believed it. 4.4 BSD was one of those operating systems, and it was far more advanced than Windows 95 (the system I used at the time). If only I had known better, I could have saved myself an incredible amount of frustration by switching to the UNIX world three years (or more) earlier. As it was, I discovered Linux in '99.

[Maciek · Rating 2 out of 5]

Needs a better editor. Or a ghostwriter. It's full of the sort of mangled writing that academics seem to love. The contents are interesting, but sometimes the overview gets too detailed. The level of familiarity assumed seems inconsistent: some fairly basic concepts are discussed at length, while other not-so-basic concepts are assumed common knowledge.

[Wesley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good stuff if you are into the details of this sort of thing.