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Parin Sharma

How the Linux kernel works | TuxRadar Linux - 0 views

www.tuxradar.com/...how-linux-kernel-works

how to linux kernel FOSS GNU

shared by Parin Sharma on 08 Mar 10 - Cached
  • The kernel makes its services available to the application programs that run on it through a large collection of entry points, known technically as system calls.
  • From a programmer's viewpoint, these look just like ordinary function calls, although in reality a system call involves a distinct switch in the operating mode of the processor from user space to kernel space. Together, the repertoire of system calls provides a 'Linux virtual machine', which can be thought of as an abstraction of the underlying hardware.
  • An even less visible function of the kernel, even to programmers, is memory management. Each process runs under the illusion that it has an address space (a valid range of memory addresses) to call its own.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Note that specific application protocols such as FTP, DNS or HTTP are implemented by user-level programs and aren't part of the kernel.
  • the kernel provides a large collection of modules that know how to handle the low-level details of talking to hardware devices - how to read a sector from a disk, how to retrieve a packet from a network interface card and so on. These are sometimes called device drivers.
  • In contrast, modern Linux kernels are modular: a lot of the functionality is contained in modules that are loaded into the kernel dynamically.
  • This keeps the core of the kernel small and makes it possible to load or replace modules in a running kernel without rebooting.
  • This tells modprobe to include the probe_mask=1 option every time it loads the snd-hda-intel module. Some recent Linux distrubutions split this information up into multiple files under /etc/modprobe.d rather than putting it all in modprobe.conf.
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