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

Chapter 5. Filesystems and File I/O

Thus far we have traversed across the elemental resources of the kernel, such as address spaces, processor time, and physical memory. We have built an empirical understanding of process management, CPU scheduling, and memory management and the crucial abstractions they provide. We shall continue to build our understanding in this chapter by looking at another key abstraction provided by the kernel, the file I/O architecture. We will look in detail at aspects such as:

  • Filesystem implementation
  • File I/O
  • VFS
  • VFS data structures
  • Special filesystems

Computing systems exist for the sole purpose of processing data. Most algorithms are designed and programmed to extract desired information from acquired data. Data which fuels this process must be stored persistently for continuous access, mandating storage systems to be engineered to contain information safely for longer periods of time. For users however it's the operating system which fetches data from these storage...