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


In this chapter, we focused on specifics of virtual memory management with respect to process virtual address space and memory maps. We discussed critical data structures of the VM subsystem, memory descriptor structure (struct mm_struct), and VMA descriptor (struct vm_area_struct). We looked at the page cache and its data structures (struct address_space) used in reverse mapping of file buffers into various process address spaces. Finally, we explored the page table layout of Linux, which is widely used in many architectures. Having gained a thorough understanding of filesystems and virtual memory management, in the next chapter, we will extend this discussion into the IPC subsystem and its resources.