linux-insides: all about linux kernel

…in a free collaborative book!

linux-insides is a online project developed by 0xAX focused on the making of a book 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.

http://turnoff.us/geek/brothers-conflict/

The project is very detailed and already quite complete, here a content summary:

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
• Implementation of the open system call

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
• Queued spinlocks
• Semaphores
• Mutex
• Reader/Writer semaphores
• SeqLock
• RCU
• Lockdep

Memory management

• Memblock
• Fixmaps and ioremap
• kmemcheck

Cgroups

• Introduction to Control Groups

SMP

• Concepts
• Per-CPU variables
• Cpumasks
• The initcall mechanism

Data Structures in the Linux Kernel

• Doubly linked list
• Radix tree
• Bit arrays

Theory

• Paging
• Elf64
• Inline assembly
• CPUID
• MSR

Initial ram disk

• initrd

Misc

• How the kernel is compiled
• Linkers
• Linux kernel development
• Program startup process in userspace
• Write and Submit your first Linux kernel Patch
• Data types in the kernel

KernelStructures

• IDT

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References

[embed]https://0xax.gitbooks.io/linux-insides/content/[/embed]
[embed]https://0xax.gitbooks.io/linux-insides/content/[/embed]