Daniel P. Bovet - Understanding the Linux Kernel, Third Edition
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The third edition of Understanding the Linux Kernel takes you on a guided tour of the most significant data structures, algorithms, and programming tricks used in the kernel. Probing beyond superficial features, the authors offer valuable insights to people who want to know how things really work inside their machine. Important Intel-specific features are discussed. Relevant segments of code are dissected line by line. But the book covers more than just the functioning of the code it explains the theoretical underpinnings of why Linux does things the way it does.
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In the spring semester of 1997, we taught a course on operating systems based on Linux 2.0. The idea was to encourage students to read the source code. To achieve this, we assigned term projects consisting of making changes to the kernel and performing tests on the modified version. We also wrote course notes for our students about a few critical features of Linux such as task switching and task scheduling.
Out of this work and with a lot of support from our O'Reilly editor Andy Oram came the first edition of Understanding the Linux Kernel at the end of 2000, which covered Linux 2.2 with a few anticipations on Linux 2.4. The success encountered by this book encouraged us to continue along this line. At the end of 2002, we came out with a second edition covering Linux 2.4. You are now looking at the third edition, which covers Linux 2.6.
As in our previous experiences, we read thousands of lines of code, trying to make sense of them. After all this work, we can say that it was worth the effort. We learned a lot of things you don't find in books, and we hope we have succeeded in conveying some of this information in the following pages.
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:
Efficient kernels take advantage of most available hardware features, such as addressing techniques, caches, processor exceptions, special instructions, processor control registers, and so on. If we want to convince you that the kernel indeed does quite a good job in performing a specific task, we must first tell what kind of support comes from the hardware.
Even if a large portion of a Unix kernel source code is processor-independent and coded in C language, a small and critical part is coded in assembly language. A thorough knowledge of the kernel, therefore, requires the study of a few assembly language fragments that interact with the hardware.
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.
Linux source code for all supported architectures is contained in more than 14,000 C and assembly language files stored in about 1000 subdirectories; it consists of roughly 6 million lines of code, which occupy over 230 megabytes of disk space. Of course, this book can cover only a very small portion of that code. Just to figure out how big the Linux source is, consider that the whole source code of the book you are reading occupies less than 3 megabytes. Therefore, we would need more than 75 books like this to list all code, without even commenting on it!
So we had to make some choices about the parts to describe. This is a rough assessment of our decisions:
We describe process and memory management fairly thoroughly.
We cover the Virtual Filesystem and the Ext2 and Ext3 filesystems, although many functions are just mentioned without detailing the code; we do not discuss other filesystems supported by Linux.
We describe device drivers, which account for roughly 50% of the kernel, as far as the kernel interface is concerned, but do not attempt analysis of each specific driver.
The book describes the official 2.6.11 version of the Linux kernel, which can be downloaded from the web site http://www.kernel.org.
Be aware that most distributions of GNU/Linux modify the official kernel to implement new features or to improve its efficiency. In a few cases, the source code provided by your favorite distribution might differ significantly from the one described in this book.
In many cases, we show fragments of the original code rewritten in an easier-to-read but less efficient way. This occurs at time-critical points at which sections of programs are often written in a mixture of hand-optimized C and assembly code. Once again, our aim is to provide some help in studying the original Linux code.
While discussing kernel code, we often end up describing the underpinnings of many familiar features that Unix programmers have heard of and about which they may be curious (shared and mapped memory, signals, pipes, symbolic links, and so on).
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