Date: Thu, 30 Jul 1998 17:23:41 +0930 From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> To: Leo Papandreou <leo@talcom.net>, questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Bill Jolitz's book Message-ID: <19980730172341.F7830@freebie.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <19980729144728.36526@supersex.com>; from Leo Papandreou on Wed, Jul 29, 1998 at 02:47:28PM -0400 References: <01e901bdba66$05ad0ea0$16396464@rommy.indosat.co.id> <19980729144728.36526@supersex.com>
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On Wednesday, 29 July 1998 at 14:47:28 -0400, Leo Papandreou wrote: > On Tue, Jul 28, 1998 at 01:26:36PM -0700, Rommy Bastian wrote: >> Hi Guru... >> Now, I'm trying to understand FreeBSD kernel. For me, the "darkest" >> side of the source is the part that use 386 assembly languge, >> (the lower side of the kernel). And I heard that Bill Jolitz has a book >> that describe it's 386BSD basic kernel, which cover that story. >> The book title's "Source Code Secrets : The Basic Kernel (Operating >> System Source Code Secrets, Vol 1) ". > > I dont know about the book but I first heard of 386BSD through a series > of articles Jolitz published in Dr. Dobbs Journal (I believe they are still > available - check out ddj.com). Same here. The book is sort of an outgrowth of the articles. > DDJ also sells a 386BSD cdrom; maybe the book you are refering is a > reprint of those articles and is bundled with the cdrom. No, the book is one of two originally planned books. The publisher changed his mind about publishing the second book after the first was published. I'd guess that sales were *much* worse than expected. I have the CD-ROM. It's useless. It's completely out of date, and it's very expensive (I paid $100). The main reason I bought it was for the documents that it includes, and I found they're all in some Microsoft format which I can't read. I was seriously upset. >> My question is : >> 1. Is this book still suitable for FreeBSD. I mean that If I read about, >> how the kernel load to memory, how the system start up, about context >> switch, lower level of memory manager. Is that useful to understand >> FreeBSD way. > > Well, its certainly not useless but 386BSD is dead and dated. In my > opinion you would do better to buy the Design and Implemention of 4.4BSD > (the actual name escapes me. Its red and has a little devil on the cover) > which does an excellent job explaining much of the FreeBSD source. Yes, "The Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD Operating System". The two books are very different: the 4.4BSD book is at a much higher level (often too high for my liking), whereas the Jolitz book is at a very low level (literally commenting on every line of code). I think the latter approach is a disadvantage; the way the Rich Stevens approaches it in the second edition of "TCP/IP illustrated" is much better. I'd recommend against anything of the Jolitz's. Greg -- See complete headers for address and phone numbers finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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