I spend most of my time teaching classes on Solaris internals, device drivers, and kernel crash dump analysis and debugging. When explaining to classes how various subsystems are implemented in Solaris, students often ask, “How does it work in Linux?” or, “In FreeBSD, it works like this, how about Solaris?” This article examines three of the basic subsystems of the kernel and compares implementation between Solaris 10, Linux 2.6, and FreeBSD 5.3.
The three subsystems examined are scheduling, memory management, and file system architecture. I chose these subsystems because they are common to any operating system (not just Unix and Unix-like systems), and they tend to be the most well-understood components of the operating system.
Link: opensolaris.org
