Understanding the LINUX Kernel: From I/O Ports to Process Management

Have you ever wondered why Linux is so efficient? Do you want to know if its performance will be useful for some unusual application that you have? Have you ever tried to look at the kernel source code? If you answered yes to any of these questions, this is the book for you. Understanding the Linux Kernel gives you a guided tour of the Linux kernel along with valuable and significant insights. Although Linux is often perceived as a casual hacker experiment, it has increasingly become not only a mission-critical part of many organizations, but also a sophisticated display of programming skill. It incorporates many advanced operating-system concepts and has proven itself extremely robust and efficient for a wide range of uses. After reading this book, you will understand what conditions bring out Linux's best performance and how it meets the challenge of providing good system response during process scheduling, file access, and memory management in a wide variety of environments. The authors introduce each topic by explaining its importance, and relate kernel operations to the system calls or utilities that are familiar to Unix programmers and users. Major topics include: Memory management, including file buffering, process swapping, and Direct Memory Access (DMA); The Virtual Filesystem and the Second Extended Filesystem; Process creation and scheduling; Signals, interrupts, and the essential interfaces to device drivers; Timing; Synchronization in the kernel; Interprocess Communication (IPC); Program execution