LA-64 Linux Kernel Design and Implementation

Author: David Mosberger
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-11-01
Features: This book is a milestone in the history of operating system software development. It introduces a powerful and completely open operating system and analyzes the design thinking of kernel developers who ported its kernel to a brand-new CPU architecture from a unique perspective. This book is suitable for students learning operating system programming and can also teach experienced kernel programmers a few tricks. It provides an in-depth technical introduction to modern CPUs, their instruction sets and architectures, as well as the Linux kernel. It also demonstrates how modern microprocessor designers build microprocessors from the perspectives of efficiency and scalability. Additionally, it covers the design goals of the kernel at the hardware-agnostic level, as well as the specific implementation between the hardware-agnostic part and the IA-64 architecture. The book covers all the decisions made by kernel designers in the process of porting Linux to IA-64, showing how they integrated hardware and software into a system that can operate properly.