Understanding the Linux Kernel, Second Edition

Acknowledgments

This book would not have been written without the precious help of the many students of the University of Rome school of engineering “Tor Vergata” who took our course and tried to decipher lecture notes about the Linux kernel. Their strenuous efforts to grasp the meaning of the source code led us to improve our presentation and correct many mistakes.

Andy Oram, our wonderful editor at O’Reilly & Associates, deserves a lot of credit. He was the first at O’Reilly to believe in this project, and he spent a lot of time and energy deciphering our preliminary drafts. He also suggested many ways to make the book more readable, and he wrote several excellent introductory paragraphs.

Many thanks also to the O’Reilly staff, especially Rob Romano, the technical illustrator, and Lenny Muellner, for tools support.

We had some prestigious reviewers who read our text quite carefully. The first edition was checked by (in alphabetical order by first name) Alan Cox, Michael Kerrisk, Paul Kinzelman, Raph Levien, and Rik van Riel.

Erez Zadok, Jerry Cooperstein, John Goerzen, Michael Kerrisk, Paul Kinzelman, Rik van Riel, and Walt Smith reviewed this second edition. Their comments, together with those of many readers from all over the world, helped us to remove several errors and inaccuracies and have made this book stronger.

—Daniel P. Bovet

Marco Cesati

September 2002