Linux Appliance Design

Chapter 1. APPLIANCE ARCHITECTURE

We'll begin our adventure with a high-level look at the architecture of a Linux appliance. We'll then drop a little lower in altitude and look at a Linux appliance from the perspective of processes. As you'll soon see, the view from this lower altitude matches the organization and chapters used throughout this book.

In this chapter, we will cover the following:

• UIs and daemons

• The architecture of the Laddie appliance

We have worked on Linux appliances that range from small, handheld devices to large, multi-gigabyte, multi-processor network servers. Most of these appliances have a strikingly similar software architecture.

Figure 1-1 shows the software stack we typically see in a Linux appliance. At the bottom of this ...