Rating:  Summary: Great book - hard read Review: If you don't already know a lot about what a Unix kernel does, get a book on that first and study hard. This book is about how the Linux kernel does what it does, i.e. the code involved. It skims over or simplifies some of the harder stuff so I suspect that modifying the kernel with this book as your guide may still be pretty difficult. That said, it does give lots of detail and gives a pretty good overview of how Linux makes everything happen. WARNING: Reading this book may make your head hurt. (Well, mine anyway!)
Rating:  Summary: OK introduction, but out of date Review: If you want an introduction on how the Linux kernel works, this book does an OK job, though the information is slightly out-of-date for Linux 2.0 and inadequate for recent 2.1 kernels. However, it wants to teach how to write device drivers, and here it falls far from its goal. When writing a Linux device driver, there is a "how", but there is, perhaps more important, a "how _not_" (for instance, don't do noninterruptible blocking system calls) which are either glossed over, or done wrong in the examples.
Rating:  Summary: Introduction to the kernel Review: Introduction to the kernel Memory managemen
Rating:  Summary: Very hard to understand Review: It is a book not so good, expecially the part talking about device drivers. Too few examples and too abstract. It doesn't teach you so much, on the contrary, it only shows you the source of the kernel without too much explanations.
Rating:  Summary: Linux-Hope of 21th centre Review: Linux kelnel internals is the best book to Linux kelnel.In China, many student,many programmer study lINUX now.We use Linux Kelnel Internals. in next centre,we will see Linux instead MS- Windows.The very book help it become true.
Rating:  Summary: disappointing Review: Not a bad book, but not great. Describes the 1.2 release of linux. Unfortunately, I was hoping for the linux version of the excellent Design and Implementation of 4.4BSD, and was severely disappointed. This is more of an overview of the kernel than anything else. Details are severely lacking, and it provides relatively little information that is not found in the khg (kernel hackers guide). If you need a introduction to the kernel though, this is a good book.
Rating:  Summary: review Review: revie
Rating:  Summary: Excellent book for programmers familiar with Unix Review: Since I had already taken a course in university on Unix Kernel Architecture, I found this book a good introduction to the Linux implementation. If you can pick up concepts quickly you may find the book adequate on its own, otherwise get another general Operating Systems textbook to help you with things like understanding virtual memory, interrupt service routines, drivers and networking concepts. The author's goal seems to be to introduce you to a good portion of the kernel source code. Understanding the kernel source tree, the build process and the code itself is much easier once you have read the first few chapters of the book. The book avoids teaching you or even using examples in assembly language. This may annoy you if you know assembly language, or thrill you if you don't. For example, the extremely time-critical interupt service routines, which are written in hand-optimized assembler, are explained with some C-like pseudo code. Although the book is quite short, it is well written, and it explains the Linux kernel implementation in sufficient detail. Although it was intentional, some readers may wish that the book included more explanation of the concepts before the implementation is introduced. A suggested companion text would be Andrew Tannenbaum's "Operating Systems: Design and Implementation".
Rating:  Summary: Unclear presentation, crucial material missing Review: The book is largely a comment of the source code, most which is branded as "too complicated". System administrators can not find the stuff that interests them (how to determine time slice, how to control paging/and swapping, what kernel variables are available for tweaking) The presentation style is unclear, superficial and assumes that the readers are the people who wrote kernel itself. I didn't learn anything and so far I consider my money wasted on this book. A note to Amazon.com: if you expect us to pay $41 for the book, be so kind and publish the table of contents!
Rating:  Summary: Mostly well done...lacking in some areas Review: The book is well done. There's no way you could please everyone when attempting to explain the kernel of an OS, but I thought they did an outstanding job. It makes "grepping" through the source much more pleasant and understandable. Chapters 1 through 3 present the flow of processes in Linux and introduce the operation of system calls, wait queues,etc. The chapter on the file system was very well done, however, the chapter on memory management left me with more questions than answers...it needs a little more work. The book requires a pretty good knowledge of C and some prior knowledge of OS's in general.
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