Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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!

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!

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!

I just recently started working on the Linux kernel and this
book helped get me off the ground and going. I do wish it had
more depth and detail in some areas, but for the price I don't
think you can go wrong. For example, I needed much more detail
in the area of multiprocessing than this book provided. An
excellent companion book is "UNIX Systems for Modern Architectures: Symmetric Multiprocessing and Caching for Kernel
Programmers" by Curt Schimmel. This latter book provided the

extra background and depth for me to finally understand how
all the pieces fit together in this area.

This book is very nicely written. This book will solve the purpose for beginners as well as for experts. I had the source code for linux, but i couldnt find a way to delve into the finer details and associate it with the architectural details of x86. This book helped me achieve that. This book builds up a required base hardware/software for each topic and then delves into the finer details. I suggest referring the Intel systems programming manuals before/during reading this book.

Pavan

In reference to some comment made by another reader I just want to point out that kernel stack switch happens in the middle of _switch_to macro as described in the para -4 of chapter-3(Pg-87). I don't want to start a war here but I would like to say to reviewers to kindly read carefully before blaming a book.

I guess the right way to understand the kernel is download the intel programmer's guide (80386) and the kernel source code for linux version 2.2.14. Read the gates and segemnts section from intel, you may skip the task switching part for linux does not use the task switch of intel. All task switch is done in software. Dig in the source code along with the book. But don;t confuse between versions. Because the way fast and slow intrs were handeled before are different than that in 2.2.*. So in a way the device driver book by Rubini's interrupt handling section is not in accordance with this book. But this book's way is the one as per linux version2.2 which is later than what Rubini's book is based on 2.0.
I owe many thanks to the writers of this book who made an excellent job.

This book is definitely very good introduction to Linux kernel.
But the approach used in this book is not good.
I recommend it as reference material.
In my opinion, to teach S/W, the best way is
showing Data structures and how each data structure is related each other
in a big picture.
All you need to say is problem description, objective and data structure used to solve the problem and bried mechanism if necessary. In doing so, you don't have to say much. Just a few pictures are enough.

But this book tries to explain some codes in words.
This is not good, boring and even frustrating. Instead, the authors should have excerpted actual source codes.Most chapters are written this way, so for newbies, this will be really boring.
This is a good reference for existing code not a good introduction to kernel components.

Note that this is not a book about using or setting up Linux; it's about how the kernel was programmed. I read through this book while working on a file system for a graduate course in operating systems. It clearly explains the logic behind many of the structures and algorithms. Reading those entries greatly prepared me for the design portion of my work and made appreciate the beauty of the Linux kernel, which up until reading this book, I had looked at as a toy OS.

I've been using Linux mainly at the application level for a
few years now, and decided to go down to the kernel level. This book gave me a good introduction into the kernel internals. But I did find this book a bit heavy on code description, that I could of dug up myself. Telling me, which functions are called in a long descriptive list isn't really required if can view the source code yourself.
I also like lots of pictures to explain complex components such as memory management, the filesystem, etc. The pictures weren't bad, but could of been better. Why not describe a component based on pictures in each Chapter.
Overall a good start to learning the Linux kernel.

This is the linux kernel book thar makes the difference. Although I 've tried some other books on the subject it was "Understanding the Linux kernel" that gave me some answers to my questions. It covers anything (ok, except networking, it is the core kernel book) from booting to other topics with lots of diagrams.