Free

Linux Inside

By OxAX

Free

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Description Table of Contents Reviews

Book Description

A book-in-progress about the linux kernel and its insides.

The goal is simple - to share my modest knowledge about the insides of the linux kernel and help people who are interested in linux kernel insides, and other low-level subject matter. - @0xAX

Read online at Gitbooks.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Booting
- From bootloader to kernel
- First steps in the kernel setup code
- Video mode initialization and transition to protected mode
- Transition to 64-bit mode
- Kernel decompression
Initialization
- First steps in the kernel
- Early interrupts handler
- Last preparations before the kernel entry point
- Kernel entry point
- Continue architecture-specific boot-time initializations
- Architecture-specific initializations, again...
- End of the architecture-specific initializations, almost...
- Scheduler initialization
- RCU initialization
- End of initialization
Interrupts
- Introduction
- Start to dive into interrupts
- Interrupt handlers
- Initialization of non-early interrupt gates
- Implementation of some exception handlers
- Handling Non-Maskable interrupts
- Dive into external hardware interrupts
- Initialization of external hardware interrupts structures
- Softirq, Tasklets and Workqueues
- Last part
System calls
- Introduction to system calls
- How the Linux kernel handles a system call
- vsyscall and vDSO
- How the Linux kernel runs a program
Timers and time management
- Introduction
- Clocksource framework
- The tick broadcast framework and dyntick
- Introduction to timers
- Clockevents framework
- x86 related clock sources
- Time related system calls
Synchronization primitives
- Introduction to spinlocks
Memory management
- Memblock
- Fixmaps and ioremap
Concepts
- Per-CPU variables
- Cpumasks
- The initcall mechanism
Data Structures in the Linux Kernel
- Doubly linked list
- Radix tree
- Bit arrays
Theory
- Paging
- Elf64
Misc
- How the kernel is compiled
- Linkers
- Linux kernel development
Useful links
Contributors