Under The Hood Look At Operating Systems Internals with Windows and Linux

[08-Sep-2010]

Extremely Recommended reading:

• Checkout this Blog on Operating Systems (Linux And Windows) by Gustavo Duartes http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/

• This blog has some simply delicious diagrams with 1-2 page explanations of Paging, Virtual Memory, Caching, Physical level RAM, Snapshot of a Process in Memory.
  
• This is a simply superb blog. "A picture is worth a thousand words!!". The articles have some high quality illustrations which esp. for visual learners is a delight. Just working through the flow in the diagrams makes the text just an add-on (to explicitly elaborate on any point you might have missed).
  
• This helps you get an "all-at-once" picture of the entire flow and inter-relationships between different parts (esp. if you're a visual/top-down learner).
• I learned more in 30 minutes of analyzing these lovely diagrams than boring holes in all the below books for days on end.

Once you've gone through this blog the below books become so much more intelligible:

• Operating System Concepts 5th ed. by Galvin et. al.
• Understanding the Linux Kernel 3rd ed. by Bovet and Cesati
• Linux System Programming by Robert Love

Good article on RSS and VSZ reporting by ps aux and pmap to determine memory footprint of your proces. 
See the comments for some good discussion of internals