Author: JT Smith
experiment. But as Linux has increasingly become a mission-critical
part of many organizations, a deep knowledge of Linux is increasingly
valued as a sophisticated display of programming skill. In order to
really understand Linux, you must understand the kernel.
Linux was developed by Linus Torvalds at the University of Helsinki in
Finland. To complete the operating system, Torvalds and other team
members made use of system components developed by members of the Free
Software Foundation for the GNU project. Thus, the only software to
which the term “Linux” applies is the kernel. The Linux kernel is
responsible for the sophisticated memory management of the whole
system, and the force behind Linux efficiency.
The kernel is the essential center of Linux, providing all the basic
services for all other parts of the operating system. Typically, the
kernel handles all requests or completed I/O operations and determines
which programs will share the kernel’s processing time and in what
order.
“Linux source code for all supported architectures is contained in
For more information about the book, including Table of Contents,
about 4500 C and Assembly files stored in about 270 subdirectories. It
consists of about 2 million lines of code, which occupy more than 58
megabytes of disk space,” says Daniel P. Bovet, coauthor of the latest
O’Reilly release “Understanding the Linux Kernel.” “After reading this
book, you should be able to find your way through the code,
distinguishing between crucial data structures and secondary ones–in
short, you’ll become a true Linux hacker.”
index,
author bios, and samples, see:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/linuxkernel/
