Linux is presented too often as a casual hacker experiment. But it has increasingly become not only a mission-critical part of many organizations, but a sophisticated display of programming skill. It incorporates many advanced operating system concepts and has proven itself extremely robust and efficient for a wide range of uses.

After reading this book, you will understand when Linux performs best and how it meets the challenge of different environments that assign varying importance to the system's responsiveness in process scheduling, file access, and memory management. The authors introduce each topic by explaining why it is important, and relate kernel operations to the system calls or utilities that are familiar to Unix programmers and users.

Major topics include:

• Memory management, including file buffering, process swapping, and DirectMemory Access (DMA)
• The Virtual File System and the Second Extended File System
• Process creation and scheduling
• Signals, interrupts, and the essential interfaces to device drivers
• Timing
• Synchronization in the kernel
• Inter-Process Communication (IPC)
• Program execution