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

Daniel Pierre Bovet (Author), Marco Cesati (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0596000022 | ISBN-13: 978-0596000028 | Publication Date: October 8, 2000 | Edition: 1st

Why is Linux so efficient? Is it the right operating system for a particular application? What can be learned from looking at the kernel source code? These are the kinds of questions that Understanding the Linux Kernel takes in stride in this guided tour of the code that forms the core of all Linux operating systems.

Linux is presented too often as a casual hacker experiment. It has increasingly become not only a mission-critical part of many organizations, but 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.

Understanding the Linux Kernel helps readers understand how Linux performs best and how it meets the challenge of different environments. The authors introduce each topic by explaining its importance, and show how kernel operations relate to the 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 File System and the Second Extended File System
• Process creation and scheduling
• Signals, interrupts, and the essential interfaces to device drivers
• Timing
• Synchronization in the kernel
• Inter-Process Communication (IPC)
• Program execution

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Understanding the Linux Kernel is intended to be read by those who are happy to check points off against the source code. The first thing you learn is how Linux, released from commercial constraints, is able to take advantage of the best ideas from other systems, implemented in wonderfully flexible ways. A good example is the Virtual File System (VFS), which has made it easy to add support for file systems from almost every other OS. It's fascinating to find out how such features are implemented. Then, there are loadable modules, I/O, scheduling, multitasking, multiprocessing, interrupts, spin locks, semaphores, and all of the other goodies that are involved in making a kernel work.

The authors are concerned primarily with the Linux 2.2 kernel. They discuss how Linus Torvald's decisions on kernel issues translate into architecture; for example, how the Linux memory management uses a slab allocator on top of a buddy system for greater efficiency. Similarly, at the cost of a little complexity, the decision to use three-level memory paging, when two work fine on 32-bit systems, makes it possible to port to 64-bit processors without changes. The tradeoffs between complexity and efficiency are discussed for most kernel features, and each chapter finishes with related new features in kernel 2.4.

Despite the lucid and knowledgeable writing, you'll come up against some brain-stretching complexity. Nevertheless, this book is an important addition to the Linux canon. --Steve Patient, Amazon.co.uk

Review

'I am impressed both by the depth of coverage and by the readability of the text, especially bearing in mind the somewhat geek-like nature of the subject that's being discussed'. Is the best explanation of Linux kernel internals that I've seen so far. This one's sure to be a classic, buy it if you can.- Developers Review, February 2001

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 685 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1st edition (October 8, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596000022
• ISBN-13: 978-0596000028
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.1 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,484,776 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

105 of 109 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A landmark book for Linux Kernel !!, December 6, 2000

By 

Geoffrey Kong (Mountain View, CA, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Understanding the LINUX Kernel: From I/O Ports to Process Management (Paperback)

Can a professional OS book feature both easy to read and detailed/accurate in technical level?

The answer is 'yes' for this book. I have been looking for this kind of book for years. Now I have it. This book delayed publishing for 3 months, the waiting is worthwhile. I spent 3 weeks to read this book very carefully. I got tons of my uncertain question marks about kernel in mind answered. I have explored the kernel for years. I should say, I have browsered almost all documents/books I could find from websites and bookstores. This book is the best one (not one of the best) in this topic I could find on this planet.

Besides the 'tranditional' subjets, like, process,memory, interrupt,signals,IPC, it also depicts 'file system' in very details which is rarely done by other kernel books. The most outstanding trait is that it is so 'user friendly' for you to read. Its style always remind me of my own jotting in my note book, but of course, it is much more complete, accurate and super well organised. Its narration is brief and simple enough for you to udnerstand and remember; meanwhile, it never loses the technical details and accuracy for your further adventure.

If there is any 'complaints', I should say, I like to see some general I/O subjects, like, tty console, display, network and etc, to be discuss, maybe in another book.

However, I'd like to say that this book is a great contribution to linux kernel community.

Thanks authors, this book deserve a 6 stars mark!

30 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The best you can do without grepping through the source tree, January 23, 2001

By 

Neil Horman (Raleigh, North Carolina USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Understanding the LINUX Kernel: From I/O Ports to Process Management (Paperback)

A pretty handly book - goes well with the Oreilly book on linux device drivers. Covers memory memory mangement well, although it can be a bit confising on the difference between Intel memory segmentation and kernel Paging. Good attention paid to forward looking differences between the 2.2 and 2.4 kernels. It would be nice to see the next revision deal exclusively with 2.4 (lets hope :) ). All in all, a worthwhile book to have on your shelf!

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Best of the worst, January 2, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Understanding the LINUX Kernel: From I/O Ports to Process Management (Paperback)

This book is probably the best book around, but it's still not what it should be. The authors emphasize a lot on assembly language but never bother to explain the big picture. What might have helped is a short chapter on C and assembly language interfacing, and just a road map of function calls with a detailed description of data structures, locking, and deadlock conditions. More emphasis should have been given to tricky things like bh, tasklets, and softirqs (which is absent).

At many places the book is ambiguous. For example, if process A is running when an interrupt comes that will eventually wake up process B -- which kernel stack does this interrupt use? A or B. Well not too difficult to figure out, but the book should point these little things out rather than making general statements like "the IF flags are saved on the stack" -- everyone knows its saved on the stack, but which one?

There is no shortcut to reading the source code so there is no point in explaining one zillion times that mov a, b will move a to b. BTW the author never explains various things that gcc and ld implicitly do to the final image (e.g., how is the function table for do_initcalls created and populated and why does the order of linking change the initialization process. etc etc)

I regret buying the book and I wish I had spent my time and money on grepping and buying coffee. Read the DJASM guide to gcc and assembly and use any source navigator to browse through the source. Its far simpler that way -- and you are uptodate with the kernel releases. happy hacking!