"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.