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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

On his quote about educational value of UNIX and being so small you can go through it line by line to lean what it does. Can someone recommend a version appropriate for doing this?

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Indubitably:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lions%27_Commentary_on_UNIX_6t...

(That's what the sibling comments are also referring to!)

As other replies say, I too have read that the Lions' stuff is highly recommended; have not read it though. I have read good chunks of The Design of the Unix Operating System by Maurice Bach, some years ago, which included both concepts and either code or pseudocode for various kernel algorithms such as scheduling, etc, IIRC. Might not be up to date for today's Unixen, but should be good for learning a lot about the basics of Unix internals, I'd say. Disclaimer: I read it out of interest, not done kernel level work myself.

Edited for typo.

As well as Minix, which is intended as just such a teaching aid and comes with a textbook, there's the Lions book, which is a complete annotated source listing of an early Unix, and which was passed around as nerd Samizdat for a while, until the Unix copyright status was changed.

http://www.lemis.com/grog/Documentation/Lions/index.php

Thank you, and thank you everyone else for all these resources. My wife will be rather displeased that I'm not playing Divinity 2 with her this holiday weekend ;)

https://github.com/mit-pdos/xv6-public

Minix was designed (originally) for exactly this purpose.

Somewhere I had a 3 ring binder of the complete source for Minix, can't remember where I picked it up, but long gone now, sadly.

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