Understanding the LINUX Kernel: From I/O Ports to Process Management | 
 enlarge | Authors: Daniel Pierre Bovet, Marco Cesati
Publisher: O'Reilly
Category: Book
List Price: $39.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  17 reviews
Sales Rank: 905827
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 685
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.2
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 7 x 1.3
ISBN: 0596000022
Dewey Decimal Number: 005.432
UPC: 636920000020
EAN: 9780596000028
ASIN: 0596000022
Publication Date: October 1, 2000
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Condition: The text is clean with some moderate exterior wear.
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| 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
Product Description
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
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| Customer Reviews: Read 12 more reviews...
 Pretty good, but could be better January 7, 2005
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.
 Great explanation of design June 29, 2003
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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.
 now out of date, questionable accuracy even when it was new November 5, 2002
8 out of 18 found this review helpful
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 September 6, 2002
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
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 theextra background and depth for me to finally understand how
all the pieces fit together in this area.
simply the best August 27, 2002
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
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.
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