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

Special filesystems


Unlike regular filesystems, which are designed to manage persistent file data backed on to a storage device, the kernel implements various special filesystems that manage a specific class of kernel in-core data structures. Since these filesystems do not deal with persistent data, they do not consume disk blocks, and the entire filesystem structure is maintained in-core. Presence of such filesystems enables simplified application development, debugging, and easier error detection. There are many filesystems in this category, each deliberately designed and implemented for a specific purpose. Following is brief description of a few important ones.

Procfs

Procfs is a special filesystem that enumerates kernel data structures as files. This filesystem serves as a debugging resource for kernel programmers, since it allows users to view the state of data structures through the virtual file interface. Procfs is mounted to the /proc directory (mount point) of rootfs.

Data in procfs...