Professional Linux Kernel Architecture

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, I have to thank the thousands of programmers who have created the Linux kernel over the years—most of them commercially based, but some also just for their own private or academic joy. Without them, there would be no kernel, and I would have had nothing to write about. Please accept my apologies that I cannot list all several hundred names here, but in true UNIX style, you can easily generate the list by:

for file in $ALL_FILES_COVERED_IN_THIS_BOOK; do 

 

         git log --pretty=“format:%an” $file; done |

 

sort -u -k 2,2

It goes without saying that I admire your work very much—you are all the true heroes in this story!

What you are reading right now is the result of an evolution over more than seven years: After two years of writing, the first edition was published in German by Carl Hanser Verlag in 2003. It then described kernel 2.6.0. The text was used as a basis for the low-level design documentation for the EAL4+ security evaluation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, requiring to update it to kernel 2.6.18 (if the EAL acronym does not mean anything to you, then Wikipedia is once more your friend). Hewlett-Packard sponsored the translation into English and has, thankfully, granted the rights to publish the result. Updates to kernel 2.6.24 were then performed specifically for this book.

Several people were involved in this evolution, and my appreciation goes to all of them: Leslie Mackay-Poulton, with support from David Jacobs, did a tremendous ...