The goal of this book is to bring together and explain current practice in operating systems. This includes much of what is traditionally covered in operating-system textbooks: concurrency, scheduling, linking and loading, storage management (both real and virtual), file systems, and security. However, the book also covers issues that come up every day in operating-systems design and implementation but are not often taught in undergraduate courses. For example, the text includes:

• Deferred work, which includes deferred and asynchronous procedure calls in Windows, tasklets in Linux, and interrupt threads in Solaris.
• The intricacies of thread switching, on both uniprocessor and multiprocessor systems.
• Modern file systems, such as ZFS and WAFL.
• Distributed file systems, including CIFS and NFS version 4.

The book and its accompanying significant programming projects make students come to grips with current operating systems and their major operating-system components and to attain an intimate understanding of how they work.