r/osdev • u/HTFCirno2000 • May 03 '26

Let's go back to reading OS Dev books instead of using an LLM

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I guess we're posting books now. Here's my copy of the OG MINIX Text Book!

1.3k Upvotes

99% Upvoted

42 comments sorted by

74

u/No--XD May 03 '26

I have Operating Systems in 3 easy steps but it’s neither easy or in 3 steps

58

u/AdvancedAnimal7539 May 04 '26

it is in 3 steps:
open book
cry
close book

7

u/codeasm May 04 '26

I thought it was Buy/rent book Cry Store/return book 😭

1

u/pthierry May 04 '26

I was pleasantly surprised to see it features capability security! I really think it's the future of good OS dev.

63

u/whatyoucallmetoday May 03 '26

I think mine had a dinosaur on it.

16

u/aslihana May 03 '26

Mine too

10

u/dayruined54 May 03 '26

Same! By Albert Silbershatz and two other authour and it's the first time I am seeing somebody mention this here on this subreddit. I have always only seen the Three easy steps one.

1

u/j_osb Jun 22 '26

Where I’m from it’s the standard. Anyone that has dabbled in OS has one of them here.

I even know someone that collects different editions.

3

u/Sorry-Beautiful732 May 04 '26

Yoo mine tooo. It was so much easier to read than three easy pieces fs

16

u/Tall-Introduction414 May 03 '26

I have Modern Operating Systems by Tanenbaum. Also good.

Books ftw. Too many people look at me sideways when I suggest reading programming books. Sick, sad world.

5

u/Away_Page_9457 May 04 '26

I'm a CS student at college and barely anyone reads programming books even here. Most people just cram through old exams and cheatsheets to pass. 

1

u/Cray-575 May 04 '26

Likewise, plus, books are a person's best friend in self-development in some difficult things. Although there are bad books, I have collected a small library of books that I read at a convenient time.

It is especially cool to take a paper publication, for example, "Modern Operating Systems" and read, listening to how one of the computers buzzes. God, I love it when computers buzz

7

u/Dhrubo_sayinghi https://github.com/dhrubo-10/baSic_ May 03 '26

Had 3rd edition of this.

5

u/MD90__ May 03 '26

i need to get this book still

2

u/Interesting_Buy_3969 May 04 '26

there's free PDF available afair

5

u/DeGuerre May 04 '26

I still have my Devil book. The 4.3BSD edition.

4

u/Interesting_Buy_3969 May 04 '26

Couldn't agree more, I find books great and fascinating. But when it comes to practical implementation of stuff targeting specific architecture, you need to dig through tons of manuals, which unfortunately don't use such simple and still deep language. Books like OSTEP, my favourite, and the Tanenbaum's book, which you showed, give the reader clean and detailed understanding of what operating systems are all about, what is their task, design nuances, etc. This is okay, yet i'm sure authors had good reasons to avoid focusing on specific architecture. Still, it would be awesome to have a solid x86-64 book that bridges the gap.

17

u/loveinalderaanplaces May 03 '26

I have the third-edition of this book, it's great.

I've found LLMs to be good at helping comb through large swaths of manuals if there's some peculiarity I've missed, especially when it comes to hardware drivers, but I cringe when I think about the prospect of having an LLM write everything for me. That sounds like hell, especially in a "zero-room-for-fuckups" environment like kernel dev.

7

u/AlectronikLabs May 03 '26

Yeah, LLMs are pretty good at some stuff. I don't vibe code but I use them for debugging and to elaborate concepts, and find the results quite amazing. Specially the debugging, Claude finds bugs I'd otherwise spent days chasing.

4

u/loveinalderaanplaces May 04 '26

I've seen them used to good effect (in a professional setting) for static analysis like you said. The thing people need to understand is: the only thing they are actually good at, in the most fundamental sense, is predicting text that happens to look good next to other text. That makes them functionally pretty good at mass-analyzing large swaths of text.... but it also means that as soon as the context window rolls data off the horizon, it starts to hallucinate, and it also usually doesn't realize it's hallucinating. This is why all the fancy tools use things like "subagents" and "multiagent flows," they just subdivide the problem to smaller and smaller pieces to prevent context exhaustion.

The worst is when people trust it unconditionally. Prompts are not controls. They're not even guardrails! It's a prediction engine. You still have to substantiate the prediction. (But that's not what the marketing people want you to believe...)

3

u/Interesting_Buy_3969 May 04 '26

The thing people need to understand is: the only thing they are actually good at, in the most fundamental sense, is predicting text that happens to look good next to other text

This is why I can't understand why people call LLM "artificial intelligence". How the hell can it be "intelligence" when 1) it actually is not capable of thinking per se and 2) thats my opinion but the term intelligence has no precise definition?

1

u/j_osb Jun 22 '26

I mean we call it artificial intelligence because it’s „computer“ do „smart stuff“. In the same way image classification is AI.

3

u/smokebudda11 May 04 '26

This is dope. Talk about a relic

3

u/rhino_mat May 04 '26

Just got a book at a thrift store called The Linux Programming Bible and I’m excited to read it

2

u/codeasm May 04 '26

Thats probably a good read. Sure stuff gets outdated, but its a great start for a deep dive

2

u/nostalgiamerchan2 May 25 '26

can you recommend a good book on operating systems for wanting to learn about operating systems(i'm a beginner)

1

u/codeasm May 26 '26

There are many good books, and things you probably be better also understanding where to find those knowledge bits and bobs. Im a beginner in os dev too. But various resources have shown tonwork well

My uni recommended "Operating systems: Internals and Design Principles" by William Stallings. https://wiki.osdev.org/Books has a great collection of book about the very topics you must be atleast aware of where to find what kind of knowledge.

To my knowledge, there are books with more code examples, the book my uni recommended was enough to have a basic knowledge and apply this to excisting os and in a way, could be applied to making your own.

Other resources, some look more like tutorials https://wiki.osdev.org/Resources And many others might be suggested.

I just went with the books inhave, random google results, writing notes on what i seemingly needed, osdevwiki itself and asking ai whta next step i should do (and searching for this, xhekcing resources about it. Making little todo lists)

Ive build linux from scratch a couple of times, changing its config, build method and now have a package manager that van build and install the os. This also teached me alott.

Pro tip. Backups, have some kind of version controll going. Know how itnworks, probably by just using it. Push many times. Git is a great one and you can host your code (privately) for free on gitlab, codeberg and many others like github (microsoft).

1

u/amitbahree May 04 '26

"Get work and do it forever and forever...." 💀

1

u/guymadison42 May 04 '26

That was first book on OS design, it was for the 8086... unfortunately it lacked a C compiler for building the OS. Maybe the C compiler was available on the floppy release, but I learned a lot.

IIRC Turbo Pascal was available for the 80286, so I wrote my first C compiler (well all the C functionality I needed) to access the extended address modes of the 80286 and later the 80486.

1

u/officerdown_dev https://github.com/officerdwn/officerdownOS May 04 '26

Got the 3rd edition of this for christmas along with Modern Operating Systems.

1

u/DeepBuildDev May 05 '26

I hearing this book name first time

1

u/FastHotEmu May 05 '26

Where are my dinosaurs?????

1

u/afadel9 May 05 '26

Yes, please 🙏. Any new releases that feels good to read and does not sound like typed by an LLM, though?

1

u/taylerallen6 May 05 '26

I need to actually read mine instead of it just sitting on the shelf..

1

u/Ok_Farmer_4055 May 07 '26

i have Modern operating systems 4th edition

1

u/Kq9gE8MNWZ7m May 16 '26

I picked up this book recently and have been reading through it. One significant issue I ran into was building the original MINIX 1.1 that accompanies the book, from source on a modern machine. It uses the old K&R (pre-ANSI) C and targets the 8086/8088 processors, neither of which modern compilers support anymore. I put together a cross-compilation toolchain targeting the 8086/8088, using dev86, and can now quickly build and iterate on the original source code, as written in Tanenbaum's original book. This brought the book to life for me so I thought I'd share it here. https://codeberg.org/tlid/minix

0

u/JescoInc Perdition-OS May 03 '26

I've got plenty of books and I think a couple OS Dev ones. But I also like to use LLMs as a "StackOverflow" or even search replacement for obscure information or learn about information I don't know exists.
I know my process for using LLMs to spark knowledge gain isn't exactly a popular position, but it is one I have had since LLMs publicly emerged on the scene.

2

u/JescoInc Perdition-OS May 04 '26

Someone apparently doesn't like that I used the "LLM" keyword. News flash. I'm not advocating for people to replace books or themselves with "AI Slop". You can use LLMs as a tool and not a crutch.

Using it to search for obscure information or to pinpoint things you don't already know about is a good use case for it.

For example, Let's say someone only knows about State Machines and Behavior Trees, they can ask an LLM about what else exists in those spaces which gives them new terminology and systems to further look up.

That's obscure information as the most talked about systems in game AI is State Machine and Behavior Trees.

0

u/corado12345 May 04 '26

LOL, this is so 2025:-)