Book Image

Mastering Linux Kernel Development

By : CH Raghav Maruthi
Book Image

Mastering Linux Kernel Development

By: CH Raghav Maruthi

Overview of this book

Mastering Linux Kernel Development looks at the Linux kernel, its internal arrangement and design, and various core subsystems, helping you to gain significant understanding of this open source marvel. You will look at how the Linux kernel, which possesses a kind of collective intelligence thanks to its scores of contributors, remains so elegant owing to its great design. This book also looks at all the key kernel code, core data structures, functions, and macros, giving you a comprehensive foundation of the implementation details of the kernel’s core services and mechanisms. You will also look at the Linux kernel as well-designed software, which gives us insights into software design in general that are easily scalable yet fundamentally strong and safe. By the end of this book, you will have considerable understanding of and appreciation for the Linux kernel.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Index

Summary


We have traversed through one of the most crucial aspects of the Linux kernel, comprehending various nuances of memory representations and allocations. By understanding this subsystem, we have also succinctly captured the design acumen and implementation efficiency of the kernel, and more importantly understood the kernel's dynamism in accommodating finer and newer heuristics and mechanisms for continuous enhancements. Apart from the specifics of memory management, we also gauged the efficiency of the kernel in maximizing resource usage at minimal costs, ushering all classical mechanisms of code reuse and modular code structures.

Though the specifics of memory management may vary in correspondence to the underlying architecture, the generalities of design and implementation styles would mostly remain the same to achieve code stability and sensitivity to change.

In the next chapter, we will go further and look at another fundamental abstraction of the kernel: files. We will look through...