Re: Get documentation

On Mon, Apr 14, 2003 at 05:00:25AM -0300, Federico Larumbe wrote: > I'd like to know if is there documentation about the design of the OpenBSD. I was searching in several sites and in messages posted, and I just found suggestions to look into the code. > Can you help me?

The design on which all *BSD systems are based is described in (BibTeX format reference):

@Book{mckusick1996:_desig_implem,

  author       = {Marshall Kirk McKusick and Keith Bostic and Michael
                  J. Karels and John S. Quarterman},
  title        = {The Design and Implementation of the 4.4{BSD}
                  Operating System},
  publisher    = {Addison-Wesley},
  year         = 1996,
  address      = {Reading, Massachusetts}

The design of Soft Updates for the file system is described in:

@Article{ganger2000:_soft_updat,

  author       = {Gregory R. Ganger and Marshall Kirk McKusick and Craig
                  A. N. Soules and Yale N. Patt},
  title        = {Soft Updates: A Solution to the Metadata Update
                  Problem in File Systems},
  journal      = {ACM Transactions on Computer Systems},
  year         = 2000,
  volume       = 18,
  number       = 2,
  pages        = {127--153},
  month        = may

File system design is described in:

@Article{mckusick1984:_fast_file_system_unix,

  author       = {Marshall K. McKusick and William N. Joy and Samuel
                  J. Leffler and Robert S. Fabry},
  title        = {A Fast File System for {UNIX}},
  journal      = {ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS)},
  volume       = 2,
  number       = 3,
  year         = 1984,
  issn         = {0734-2071},
  pages        = {181--197},
  doi          = {
http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/989.990},
  publisher    = {ACM Press},
  month        = aug

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Gentle introduction into file systems is:

@Article{mckusick1996:_secon_storag_files,

  author       = {Marshall Kirk McKusick},
  title        = {Secondary Storage and Filesystems},
  journal      = {ACM Computing Surveys},
  year         = 1996,
  volume       = 28,
  number       = 1,
  pages        = {217--219},
  month        = mar

Some improvements to file systems are described in:

@InProceedings{seltzer1993:_implem_log_struc_file_system_unix,

  author       = {Margo Seltzer and Keith Bostic and Marshall Kirk
                  McKusick and Carl Staelin},
  title        = {An Implementation of a Log-Structured File System for
                  {UNIX}},
  booktitle    = {USENIX Technical Conference Proceedings},
  pages        = {307--326},
  year         = 1993,
  address      = {San Diego, CA},
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  month        = {Winter},

Comparison of journaling vs. soft updating in file systems is described in:

@InProceedings{seltzer2000:_journ_versus_soft_updat,

  author       = {Margo I. Seltzer and Gregory R. Granger and M. Kirk
                  McKusick and Keith A. Smith and Craig A. N. Soules and
                  Christopher A. Stein},
  title        = {Journaling Versus Soft Updates: Asynchronous Meta-data
                  Protection in File Systems},
  booktitle    = {Proceedings of the 2000 USENIX Annual Technical
                  Conference},
  year         = 2000,
  address      = {San Diego, California, USA},
  month        = "18--23~" # jun,

Take a look at http://www.usenix.org/, http://www.acm.org/, and http://computer.org digital libraries for articles on other topics besides the file systems.

Short description of FreeBSD for students (a lot of this applies to OpenBSD too) is given as an external part in PDF of probably the best undergraduate textbook in OS: Silbershatz, Galvin, Gagne, "Operating System Concepts", 6th ed.

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        http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/avi/os-book/osc/index.html

Comparison with Minix. ROTL. :-)

-- 
Zvezdan Petkovic 
http://www.cs.wm.edu/~zvezdan/