August 2000
Intermediate to advanced
896 pages
28h 17m
English

A UNIX system encompasses essentially three layers of abstraction:
• The hardware
• The operating system kernel
• The user-level programs
The kernel hides the system’s hardware underneath an abstract, high-level programming interface. It is responsible for implementing many of the facilities that users and user-level programs take for granted. For example, the kernel assembles all of the following UNIX concepts from lower-level hardware features:
• Processes (time sharing, protected address spaces)
• Signals and semaphores
• Virtual memory (swapping, paging, mapping)
• The filesystem (files, directories, ...
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