Browse Books

Reviewer: Wei-Ming Hu

The title of this book should be Operating systems—the MINIX approach. The authors cover the traditional operating systems issues, such as processes and memory management. Unlike the first edition [1], however, this book is tightly coupled to MINIX—the Unix-compatible operating system developed by Tanenbaum's group. The book is organized into sections addressing processes, I/O, memory management, and the file system. Within each section, the authors first introduce the concepts. The section on memory management, for example, starts with chapters on paging and segmentation. This material is followed by an overview of how MINIX handles memory management. Then the authors present a walkthrough of an implementation of the relevant parts of the MINIX source code that handle memory management. The book is accompanied by a CD-ROM as well as a 370-page appendix containing the source code to the current (as of publication) version of MINIX. The code in the appendix has line numbers, so readers can easily follow references from the text. The treatment is complete, and the material has been updated since the first edition. For example, the authors have added a discussion of threads. Tying the discussion to MINIX helps readers to see how an operating system really works. Readers can, for example, see the working code that does context switching. This book also serves as a good introduction to the MINIX source code for those who are interested in reading and extending it. The book's main drawback is that it presents raw code. I think it would be stronger if the authors had extracted the key code fragments, instead of forcing readers to skim through large amounts of code that are needed to make a system work, but that are not relevant to the topic being discussed. The sheer amount of detail risks drowning out the fundamental concepts that are being conveyed and precludes examination of alternative implementations.