As the writing process writes to the pipe, bytes are copied into the shared data page and when the reading process reads from the pipe, bytes are copied from the shared data page. To make it easy to find, the current, running, process is pointed to by the current pointer …

Physical filesystems reside on block storage devices, such as CDs, floppy disks, compact flash cards, or hard drives. Today open source software has become critical for almost every organization. If you love the rolling Linux distributions (here are some fixed vs rolling release differences), then you don't need to look …

Each device driver tells the operating system how to use that specific device. The process tree is rooted at the first process, known as the init process, which is typically the init program. By and throughout the 1990s, you could find MINIX installations thriving in universities worldwide-and a young Linus …

The Linux kernel, supporting both preemptive multitasking and virtual memory, provides every process both a virtualized processor and a virtualized view of memory. This is true even if the device is a modem being used by the PPP daemon to connect a Linux system onto a network. Therefore Linux adds …

No distribution of Linux is completely bug-free, so you may be required to fix small problems by hand after installation. Keep in mind that these are only conventions---not rules. There are Web sites, articles, and books devoted to the subject, and Linux User Groups (also known as LUGs) meet in …

Therefore, when moving to the PDP-11 as the main hardware platform, the developers started C as the as a core language for Unix. Advocates of copyleft respond by pointing out that there is no such thing as absolute freedom. The test and set operation is, so far as each process …

Its purpose is to provide a financial incentive for producing such works in order to benefit society as a whole. It also has a utility to let you select real-time kernels. The systemd-boot bootloader generates a menu of boot image options, and can load any EFI boot image. When a …

From the filename, the kernel obtains the inode number. The command cd may be run without a location as we saw in the shortcut above but usually will be run with a single command line argument which is the location we would like to change into. A block device cannot …

By opening the code to widespread examination, more people take part in finding its bugs and security flaws, in testing for broad compatibility across platforms, and in providing new ideas. This means that when the next process that attempts to access this memory gets a page fault, the shared memory …

In this way, the Internet acts as the glue that binds together Linux developers in particular and OSS developers in general. Built in to the structure of the command-line environment are dozens of commands and several text-based help systems. Now, imagine that the execution of all the above commands is …

It will recognize a multiline header if the last character on each line but the last is a left parenthesis or comma. In general, failing to agree with the standards is considered a bug. So, be prepared. The key to success with studying at home is strong motivation.

Has col …

Interestingly, the ability of bash scripting is also one of the most compelling reasons why programmers prefer using Linux OS. Linux has two types of system timers, both queue routines to be called at some system time but they are slightly different in their implementations. Most open source Internet tools …

Whenever we refer to a file or directory we are using one of these paths. Popular distributions include Debian, Fedora, Mint, and Ubuntu, but there are many others. The CPU can access both the system space memory and the I/O space memory, whereas the controllers themselves can only access …

The access file logs every visit to your web site. For example, a processor could execute an instruction every clock pulse. A way to prevent that is regular updates and only download software, themes and plugns form reliable sources. It looks at each member of the operations pending queue (sem_pending …

Because Linux has such a large number of contributors from across multiple decades of development, contacting each individual author and getting them to agree to a new license is virtually impossible, so that Linux remaining licensed under the GPLv2 in perpetuity is all but assured. Linux tracks the usage of …

In this case, Direct Memory Access (DMA) controllers are used to allow hardware peripherals to directly access system memory but this access is under strict control and supervision of the CPU. This creates a new vm_area_struct data structure describing the shared memory for this process. The thrust behind Linux development …

Finally there is the main memory which relative to the external cache memory is very slow. Yes, it behaved slightly differently, but I found I could be much more efficient - while using Free Software! There are various other techniques how to define shell interpreter, but this is a solid start …

The IP protocol is a transport layer that is used by other protocols to carry their data. As the cliche goes, "If we both have an apple, and we exchange apples, we each still have one apple. It provides the interfaces documented in SUSv4 and POSIX 2008, including real-time (POSIX …

For kernel code, once it is complete the developer may ask Linus to include it in the standard kernel, or as an optional add-on feature to the kernel. An inode stores metadata associated with a file, such as its modification timestamp, owner, type, length, and the location of the file's …

Linux is open-source. With all the activity around Unix at Berkeley, a new delivery of Unix software was born: the Berkeley Software Distribution, or BSD. Furthermore, the developer writing Python or Ruby or Scala can still benefit from knowledge of system programming, as an understanding of the soul of the …

Public domain refers to the total absence of copyright protection. Normally, Linux would suspend the requestor, putting the process onto a wait queue until there is enough physical memory. It sounds counterintuitive and/or just plain stupid on paper, but is generally seen as the traditional and conservative way to …

Linux (as well as many other areas of information technology) is particularly well suited for studying at home because (1) no equipment is needed other than an ordinary personal computer and (2) there is a large amount of free or modestly priced study material that is available from bookstores, in …

In addition to the real uid, each process also has an effective uid, a saved uid, and a filesystem uid. The terminal in Linux is a wild card. Whereas sockets communicating over the Internet might use a hostname and port pair for identifying the target of communication, Unix domain sockets …