Over the past decade, a regrettable idea took hold: Operating systems, while interesting, were a finished, solved problem. The genesis of this idea is manifold, but the greatest contributing factor may simply be that operating systems were not understood; they were largely delivered not as transparent systems, but rather as proprietary black boxes, welded shut to even the merely curious. This is anathema to understanding; if something can't be taken apartif its inner workings remain hiddenits intricacies can never be understood nor its engineering nuances appreciated. This is especially true of software systems, which can't even be taken apart in the traditional sense. Software is, despite the metaphors, information, not machine, and a closed software system is just about as resistant to understanding as an engineered system can be.
This was the state of Solaris circa 2000, and it was indeed not well understood. Its internals were publicly described only in arcane block comments or old USENIX papers, its behavior was opaque to existing tools, and its source code was cloistered in chambers unknown. Starting in 2000, this began to change (if slowly) heralded in part by the first edition of the volume that you now hold in your hands: Jim Mauro and Richard McDougall's Solaris™ Internals. Jim and Richard had taken on an extraordinary challengeto describe the inner workings of a system so complicated that no one person actually understands all of it. Over the course of working on their book, Jim and Richard presumably realized that no one book could contain it either. Despite scaling back their ambition to (for example) not include networking, the first edition of Solaris™ Internals still weighed in at over six hundred pages.
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