Skip to Main Content
Linux Kernel in a Nutshell
book

Linux Kernel in a Nutshell

by Greg Kroah-Hartman
December 2006
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
202 pages
8h 29m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Linux Kernel in a Nutshell

Tools to use the kernel

While the version of the kernel that is running does not usually affect any user application, there are a small number of program for which the kernel version is important. This section describes a number of tools that are probably already installed on your Linux system. If you upgrade your kernel to a version different from the one that came with your distribution, some of these packages may also need to be upgraded in order for the system to work properly.

util-linux

The util-linux package is a collection of small utilities that do a wide range of different tasks. Most of these utilities handle the mounting and creation of disk partitions and manipulation of the hardware clock in the system.

If you wish to download and install the util-linux package yourself, you can find it at http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux.

As of the 2.6.18 kernel release, the 2.10o release of util-linux is the oldest that works properly . It is recommended that you install the latest version of this package, because new version support new features added to the kernel. Bind mounts are one example of an option in newer kernels, and a newer version of util-linux is needed in order to have them work properly.

To determine which version of the util-linux package you have on your system, run the following command:

$ fdformat --version

module-init-tools

The module-init-tools package is needed if you wish to use Linux kernel modules. A kernel module is a loadable chunk of code that ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Linux Kernel Debugging

Linux Kernel Debugging

Kaiwan N. Billimoria

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596100795Supplemental ContentErrata