24.1. Introduction
This chapter outlines the design of the UNIX operating system kernel, focusing on the first widely known UNIX design, that of Bell Telephone Laboratory's Seventh Edition of 1978. The structure of that system and the major abstractions that it presents to the programmer still underpin contemporary UNIX kernels and the POSIX programming APIs. In Chapter 25 we examine how these more recent UNIX implementations build on the foundations of Seventh Edition, concentrating in particular on the mechanisms that they provide for communication between processes and for concurrency control.
There is a massive amount of literature on UNIX, including some books specifically on the kernel design and others on the environment above the kernel. ...
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