Chapter 2. Design Overview of FreeBSD

2.1 FreeBSD Facilities and the Kernel

The FreeBSD kernel provides four basic facilities: processes, a filesystem, communications, and system startup. This section outlines where each of these four basic services is described in this book.

  1. A process is composed of an address space with one or more threads of control running within it. Mechanisms for creating, terminating, and otherwise controlling processes are discussed in Chapter 4. The system multiplexes separate virtual-address spaces for each process; this memory management is discussed in Chapter 5.
  2. The user interface to the filesystem and devices is similar; common aspects are discussed in Chapter 6. The organization and management of ...

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