Cesati Marco Bovet Daniel P. - Understanding the Linux Kernel

All people curious about how Linux works and why it is so efficient will find answers here. After reading the book, you will find your way through the many thousands of lines of code, distinguishing between crucial data structures and secondary onesin short, becoming a true Linux hacker.

Our work might be considered a guided tour of the Linux kernel: most of the significant data structures and many algorithms and programming tricks used in the kernel are discussed. In many cases, the relevant fragments of code are discussed line by line. Of course, you should have the Linux source code on hand and should be willing to expend some effort deciphering some of the functions that are not, for sake of brevity, fully described.

On another level, the book provides valuable insight to people who want to know more about the critical design issues in a modern operating system. It is not specifically addressed to system administrators or programmers; it is mostly for people who want to understand how things really work inside the machine! As with any good guide, we try to go beyond superficial features. We offer a background, such as the history of major features and the reasons why they were used.

When we began to write this book, we were faced with a critical decision: should we refer to a specific hardware platform or skip the hardware-dependent details and concentrate on the pure hardware-independent parts of the kernel?

Others books on Linux kernel internals have chosen the latter approach; we decided to adopt the former one for the following reasons:

When covering hardware features, our strategy is quite simple: only sketch the features that are totally hardware-driven while detailing those that need some software support. In fact, we are interested in kernel design rather than in computer architecture.

Our next step in choosing our path consisted of selecting the computer system to describe. Although Linux is now running on several kinds of personal computers and workstations, we decided to concentrate on the very popular and cheap IBM-compatible personal computersand thus on the 80 86 microprocessors and on some support chips included in these personal computers. The term 80 86 microprocessor will be used in the forthcoming chapters to denote the Intel 80386, 80486, Pentium, Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Pentium III, and Pentium 4 microprocessors or compatible models. In a few cases, explicit references will be made to specific models.

One more choice we had to make was the order to follow in studying Linux components. We tried a bottom-up approach: start with topics that are hardware-dependent and end with those that are totally hardware-independent. In fact, we'll make many references to the 80 86 microprocessors in the first part of the book, while the rest of it is relatively hardware-independent. Significant exceptions are made in . In practice, following a bottom-up approach is not as simple as it looks, because the areas of memory management, process management, and filesystems are intertwined; a few forward referencesthat is, references to topics yet to be explainedare unavoidable.

Each chapter starts with a theoretical overview of the topics covered. The material is then presented according to the bottom-up approach. We start with the data structures needed to support the functionalities described in the chapter. Then we usually move from the lowest level of functions to higher levels, often ending by showing how system calls issued by user applications are supported.