The Linux Kernel/About

The book's title page and structure were originally influenced by the article "Splitting the Kernel" in the Linux Device Drivers book, which included a diagram. The diagram's colorful matrix design was borrowed from the Interactive map of the Linux kernel. Additionally, the layered presentation of the information in the book was inspired by the 's layers. Number of layers and functionalities intentionally are near to.

Layers
Applications and libraries in User mode above the kernel can be associated with of OSI model.

Upper layers:


 * User space interfaces - of the kernel. It is mostly represented by system calls. It can be associated with  of OSI model.


 * Virtual - provides aggregated services to upper layer, named after virtual memory and Virtual File System. Similar to.

Middle layers:


 * bridges - manages interoperability, named after . Similar to.


 * logical - provides logical implementations. Named after logical memory, address and logical file systems. Similar to.

Lower layers, similar to :
 * devices control - abstractions and control of HW interfaces. Classes of devices. HW independent generic devices.
 * hardware interfaces - direct HW interfaces. HW depended drivers.

Functionalities
The functionalities Processing, Memory, Storage and Networking look very familiar and obvious while the functionalities Human Interface and System need some explanation. The Human Interface functionality covers topics which are associated more with human users than with fundamental computing. Obviously HID (Human Interface Devices) belongs to this functionality hence the name and Multimedia also belongs here. Character devices, despite that are used as byte streams in System and Storage, are assigned to HI too. System functionality covers fundamental and common functions. Common System calls infrastructure of the kernel is described under this functionality. Specific system calls and interfaces are described under another corresponding functionalities.

The two-dimensional layout instead of a linear TOC layout allows effective organization of the book content and index existed docs and man pages.

Contribution
The book needs contributors. Here are the guidelines:


 * 1) Make articles complete, continuous and appealing.
 * 2) * Fix typos and reword.
 * 3) * Keep consistent formatting.
 * 4) Keep info updated by replacing obsolete content with modern one.
 * 5) Share your knowledge and experience about the kernel.
 * 6) Explore the source and describe it.
 * 7) Add explanations to incomplete sections.
 * 8) Copy paste text from Wikipedia.
 * 9) Add links to externals resources using templates:
 * 10) * Wikipedia articles
 * 11) * https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/latest/source
 * 12) * https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/
 * 13) * https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/
 * 14) * Other external links

Paragraph template
🔧 TODO

🗝️ Acronyms and/or key terms
 * API – Application Program Interface

🖱️ GUI
 * – a portable graphical interface to Git

⚲ APIs
 * – introduction to user commands
 * – introduction to system calls
 * – introduction to special files
 * – users-space API
 * ↯ call hierarchy:
 * ↯ call hierarchy:

🛠️ Utilities
 * – lists directory contents

👁️ Example

⚙️ Internals

🚀 Advanced features

📖 References

📚 Further reading
 * LKML

💾 Historical
 * https://tldp.org/LDP/lki/
 * https://tldp.org/HOWTO/KernelAnalysis-HOWTO.html
 * https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/

Thank you