Linux Kernel 2.4 Internals

Tigran Aivazian tigran@veritas.com

1. Booting

• 1.1 Building the Linux Kernel Image
• 1.2 Booting: Overview
• 1.3 Booting: BIOS POST
• 1.4 Booting: bootsector and setup
• 1.5 Using LILO as a bootloader
• 1.6 High level initialisation
• 1.7 SMP Bootup on x86
• 1.8 Freeing initialisation data and code
• 1.9 Processing kernel command line

2. Process and Interrupt Management

• 2.1 Task Structure and Process Table
• 2.2 Creation and termination of tasks and kernel threads
• 2.3 Linux Scheduler
• 2.4 Linux linked list implementation
• 2.5 Wait Queues
• 2.6 Kernel Timers
• 2.7 Bottom Halves
• 2.8 Task Queues
• 2.9 Tasklets
• 2.10 Softirqs
• 2.11 How System Calls Are Implemented on i386 Architecture?
• 2.12 Atomic Operations
• 2.13 Spinlocks, Read-write Spinlocks and Big-Reader Spinlocks
• 2.14 Semaphores and read/write Semaphores
• 2.15 Kernel Support for Loading Modules

3. Virtual Filesystem (VFS)

• 3.1 Inode Caches and Interaction with Dcache
• 3.2 Filesystem Registration/Unregistration
• 3.3 File Descriptor Management
• 3.4 File Structure Management
• 3.5 Superblock and Mountpoint Management
• 3.6 Example Virtual Filesystem: pipefs
• 3.7 Example Disk Filesystem: BFS
• 3.8 Execution Domains and Binary Formats

4. Linux Page Cache

5. IPC mechanisms

• 5.1 Semaphores
• 5.2 Message queues
• 5.3 Shared Memory
• 5.4 Linux IPC Primitives