The Design of the UNIX Operating System

From the Back Cover
In this timely new book, Maurice J. Bach traces the popularity of the UNIX system throughout the computer industry. The author describes the internal algorithms and structures that form the basis of the operating system (the kernel) and their relationship to the programmer interface.
Among its key features, the book:
    Describes the outline of the kernel architecture
    Introduces the system buffer cache mechanism
    Includes data structures and algorithms used internally by the file system
    Covers the system calls that provide the user interface to the file system
    Defines the context of a process and investigates the internal kernel primitives that manipulate the process context
    Presents the system calls that control the process context
    Describes process scheduling
    Discussed memory management, including swapping and paging systems
    Outlines general driver interfaces, with specific discussion of disk drivers and terminal drivers
    Presents an overview of streams
    Introduces inter-process communication and networking, including System V messages, shared memory, and semaphores
    Explains tightly couples multiprocessor UNIX systems
    Investigates distributed UNIX systems