Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System, The

The most complete, authoritative technical guide to FreeBSD's internal structure has now been extensively updated to cover all major improvements between Versions 5 and Version 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 FreeBSD's current design and implementation. Next, they cover FreeBSD from the system-call level down: from interface to kernel to hardware. Explaining key design decisions, they detail the concepts, data structures, and algorithms used in implementing each significant systems facility, including process management, security, virtual memory, the I/O system, filesystems, socket IPC, and networking. This second edition: * Explains lightweight virtualization and how it can support hundreds of instances on one system * Describes fine-grained authority delegation for improved administrative flexibility * Fully covers NFS V4 and OpenSolaris ZFS support * Introduces BSD'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 book 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.