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

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 17 Ratings

now out of date, questionable accuracy even when it was new - 2002-11-05
Reviewer Rating:
This book covers linux kernel version 2.2, kernel version 2.4 is not covered. There are trivial comments at the conclusion of each chapter "looking ahead to 2.4" which are nearly worthless.
There is no worthwhile discussion of ACLs (access control lists).

Worst of all, even when the information was current it was of questionable accuracy. In the chapter discussing the VFS on page 334 there is a list of fields in the superblock object. Then compare this list to the list of the fields in the chapter discussing the ext2 filesystem superblock on page 499 and you will see great differences. Why is this?

O'reilly needs to update this book. It's a good start, now finish it.

Helped me get started on the Linux kernel - 2002-09-06
Reviewer Rating:
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.

Great explanation of design - 2003-06-29
Reviewer Rating:
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.

simply the best - 2002-08-27
Reviewer Rating:
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.

Pretty good, but could be better - 2005-01-07
Reviewer Rating:
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.

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