Widely lauded for avoiding the typical black box approach found in other operating system textbooks, the first edition of this bestselling book taught readers how an operating system works and explained how to build it from the ground up.
Continuing to follow a logical pattern for system design, Operating System Design: The Xinu Approach, Second Edition removes the mystery from operating system design and consolidates the body of material into a systematic discipline. It presents a hierarchical design paradigm that organizes major operating system components in an orderly, understandable manner.
The book guides readers through the construction of a conventional process-based operating system using practical, straightforward primitives. It gives the implementation details of one set of primitives, usually the most popular set. Once readers understand how primitives can be implemented on conventional hardware, they can then easily implement alternative versions.

The text begins with a bare machine and proceeds step-by-step through the design and implementation of Xinu, which is a small, elegant operating system that supports dynamic process creation, dynamic memory allocation, network communication, local and remote file systems, a shell, and device-independent I/O functions. The Xinu code runs on many hardware platforms. This second edition has been completely rewritten to contrast operating systems for RISC and CISC processors. Encouraging hands-on experimentation, the book provides updated code throughout and examples for two low-cost experimenter boards: BeagleBone Black from ARM and Galileo from Intel.

这本畅销书的第一版因避免了其他操作系统教科书中典型的黑箱方法而广受赞誉，它告诉读者操作系统是如何工作的，并解释了如何从头开始构建它。

继续遵循系统设计的逻辑模式，《操作系统设计》。第二版消除了操作系统设计中的神秘感，并将这些材料整合为一门系统的学科。它提出了一个层次化的设计范式，以一种有序的、可理解的方式组织了主要的操作系统组件。

本书引导读者使用实用、直接的基元来构建一个传统的基于进程的操作系统。它给出了一组基元的实现细节，通常是最受欢迎的一组。一旦读者了解了如何在传统硬件上实现基元，他们就可以轻松实现其他版本。

该书从一台裸机开始，一步一步地设计和实现Xinu，这是一个小型、优雅的操作系统，支持动态进程创建、动态内存分配、网络通信、本地和远程文件系统、Shell以及与设备无关的I/O功能。Xinu的代码可以在许多硬件平台上运行。这个第二版已经完全重写，以对比RISC和CISC处理器的操作系统。本书鼓励动手实验，通篇提供了最新的代码和两个低成本实验板的例子。ARM的BeagleBone Black和英特尔的Galileo。