Understanding the Linux Kernel Daniel P. Bovet and Marco Cesati O'Reilly, 2000 Book web site (including a sample chapter) is here: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/linuxkernel/ Developed and tested as lecture notes for university classes in which the 2.2 kernel was examined, the new O'Reilly book Understanding The LINUX Kernel is an exhaustive enumeration of features of the ascendent modern platform. If you want to know more about what is involved in writing device drivers, or respect the complexity required to pull off a trick like MOSIX, and the flexibility of a platform that provides a ptrace() debugging function that makes it easy, this book may be for you. I fear the book would have made much less sense to me had I not taken university courses in microprocessor architecture and OS theory, but then I would not have been able to skim those parts, clear and concise, quite as quickly as I did. It is written clearly, and is full of internal references to other chapters where ideas are expanded, to see how it all works together. Instructions are given, for instance, on how to fiddle your kernel configuration so that microsoft windows programs are recognized from their magic signatures and WINE can be invoked to handle them; and other advanced 2.2 features. Each chapter ends with the most up-to-date information about changes for 2.4 that were available at the end of 2000; such as the increased number of local kernel locks and the improved VM page swap donor selection algorithm. Occasional assertions that do not match my understanding do appear, such as a bit on scheduling that seems to imply that a "fair scheduling patch" is a standard item instead of an option; I suspect it had been applied to the kernels examined in the class setting, as it would make a very tidy little homework assignment. At the end of the book there is an index of routines against the files they are found in. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0596000022/tipjartransactioA The preface claims that facts were checked by Alan Cox himself. -- David Nicol 816.235.1187 [EMAIL PROTECTED] "I don't care how they do it in New York" - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/