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Candidate for Deletion |
Linux Kernel Source
Linux is a monolithic kernel. Device drivers and kernel extensions run in kernel space, with full access to the hardware. Linux is written in the version of the C programming language supported by GCC.
While not originally designed to be portable, Linux is now one of the most widely ported operating system kernels, running on a diverse range of systems from the iPAQ (a handheld computer) to the IBM Z/Architecture (a massive mainframe server that can run hundreds or even thousands of concurrent Linux instances)
At the top is the user, or application, space. This is where the user applications are executed. Below the user space is the kernel space. Here, the Linux kernel exists.
But what does the kernel actually do? The diagram below shows the big picture. The kernel makes its services available to the application programs that run on it through a large collection of entry points, known technically as system calls.
- From a programmer's viewpoint, these look just like ordinary function calls, although in reality a system call involves a distinct switch in the operating mode of the processor from user space to kernel space. Together, the repertoire of system calls provides a 'Linux virtual machine', which can be thought of as an abstraction of the underlying hardware.
One of the more obvious abstractions provided by the kernel is the filesystem. Some features are not so directly visible. For example, the kernel is responsible for process scheduling. At any one time, there are likely to be several processes (programs) waiting to run.
The kernel's scheduler allocates CPU time to each one, so that if you look over a longer timescale (a few seconds) you have the illusion that the computer is running several programs at the same time.
An even less visible function of the kernel, even to programmers, is memory management. Each process runs under the illusion that it has an address space (a valid range of memory addresses) to call its own. In reality, it's sharing the physical memory of the computer with many other processes, and if the system is running low on memory, some of its address space may even be parked out on the disk in the swap area.
The kernel also implements networking protocols such as IP, TCP and UDP that provide machine-to-machine and process-to-process communication over a network. Again, this is all about illusions. TCP provides the illusion of a permanent connection between two processes - like a piece of copper wire connecting two telephones - but in reality no permanent connection exists. Note that specific application protocols such as FTP, DNS or HTTP are implemented by user-level programs and aren't part of the kernel.
Linux (like Unix before it) has a good reputation for security. It's the kernel that tracks the user ID and group ID of each running process and uses these to provide a yes/no decision each time an application attempts to access a resource (such as opening a file for writing), by checking the access permissions on the file. This access control model is ultimately responsible for the security of Linux systems as a whole.
The Linux kernel also exposes a great deal of information via the /proc filesystem. To make sense of /proc we need to broaden our concept of what a file is.
Instead of thinking of a file as permanent information stored on a hard drive or a CD or a memory stick, we need to think of it as any information that can be accessed via traditional system calls such as the open/read/write/close calls we saw earlier, and which can, therefore, be accessed by ordinary programs such as cat or less.
The 'files' under /proc are entirely a figment of the kernel's imagination and provide a view into many of the kernel's internal data structures.
In fact, many Linux reporting tools present nicely formatted versions of the information they find in the files under /proc. As an example, a listing of /proc/modules will show you a list of currently loaded modules that's strangely reminiscent of the output from lsmod.
The master source code for ALL linux distros is referred to as the Linux Kernel Source. Each distro usually makes its own customisations such as UbuntuKernelSource when creating their release