Linux Kernel 2.6 Documentation

By this I declare that I wrote this master thesis by myself, only with the help of the referenced literature and internet resources, under the supervision of my thesis advisor. Bratislava, 2006 Jaroslav Šoltýs This thesis is a study of internal working and interfaces of Linux kernel version 2.6. It emphasizes differences towards kernel 2.4 and it tries to introduce this problems to reader knowledgable only in common principles of operating systems. The thesis starts with briefing of kernel subsystems and continues with deeper analysis of important issues like various locking, semaphores and other synchroniza-tion mechanisms, suitable data structures, interrupt handling, atomic operations, device driver model and memory allocation. Process management and new scheduler with support for multiprocessing and NUMA architectures and preemption are explored deeply. The core of the work is concluded with description of loadable kernel module creation together with an exemplar module.