December 2002
Intermediate to advanced
784 pages
27h 7m
English
Content preview from Understanding the Linux Kernel, Second EditionBecome 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,
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Chapter 1. Introduction
Linux is a member of the large family of Unix-like operating systems. A relative newcomer experiencing sudden spectacular popularity starting in the late 1990s, Linux joins such well-known commercial Unix operating systems as System V Release 4 (SVR4), developed by AT&T (now owned by the SCO Group); the 4.4 BSD release from the University of California at Berkeley (4.4BSD); Digital Unix from Digital Equipment Corporation (now Hewlett-Packard); AIX from IBM; HP-UX from Hewlett-Packard; Solaris from Sun Microsystems; and Mac OS X from Apple Computer, Inc.
Linux was initially developed by Linus Torvalds in 1991 as an operating system for IBM-compatible personal computers based on the Intel 80386 microprocessor. Linus remains deeply involved with improving Linux, keeping it up to date with various hardware developments and coordinating the activity of hundreds of Linux developers around the world. Over the years, developers have worked to make Linux available on other architectures, including Hewlett-Packard’s Alpha, Itanium (the recent Intel’s 64-bit processor), MIPS, SPARC, Motorola MC680x0, PowerPC, and IBM’s zSeries.
One of the more appealing benefits to Linux is that it isn’t a commercial operating system: its source code under the GNU Public License[1] is open and available to anyone to study (as we will in this book); if you download the code (the official site is http://www.kernel.org) or check the sources on a Linux CD, you will be able to explore, ...
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.