Chapter Two. Kernel Overview

By Badari Pulavarti

Introduction

Now that you've made important decisions about how to install Linux on your system, you need to learn more about the Linux kernel to make important tuning decisions. We'll discuss how Linux evolved and then delve into its architecture. We'll include information on how the kernel is organized, what its responsibilities are, and how memory management is handled. We'll discuss process management and interprocess communication, followed by an overview of the Linux Symmetrical Multiprocessing Model. Finally, we'll examine the Linux file systems.

The Evolution of Linux

Linux is an operating system for personal computers developed by Linus Torvalds in 1991. Initially, Linux supported only the ...

Get Performance Tuning for Linux® Servers now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.