"This book provides a comprehensive and unified introduction to operating systems. The book emphasizes both fundamental principles and design issues in contemporary systems. Thus it is both a basic reference and an up-to-date survey of the state of the art. The book provides the reader with a solid understanding of the key mechanisms of modern operating systems and the types of design trade-offs and decisions involved in OS design." "In addition to providing coverage of the fundamentals of operating systems, this book examines the most important recent developments in OS design. Among the topics covered: threads, distributed systems, real time systems, process migration, multiprocessor scheduling, and security."--BOOK JACKET.