The number of bytes that the device driver requests is rounded up to the next block size boundary. One is AbiWord, a standalone word processor that is both comparable to and compatible with Microsoft Word. These tables include pointers to routines and information that support the interface with that class …

Until recently, most modems were 8 or 16 bit ISA cards. Free software is also very different from public domain software. There are times when controllers need to read or write large amounts of data directly to or from system memory. The device driver places bytes onto the queue, one …

The master disk on the primary controller is /dev/hda and the slave disk is /dev/hdb. It is being widely used in embedded devices such as mobile phones and PDAs (Personal Data Assistants). All the linux commands like grep, cat and ls can be pipelined easily. It sure isn't …

By applying the foundational principals behind two factors, even the most techno-phobic and proprietary software entrenched small sized companies can painlessly move to Linux on the Desktop. It looks at each member of the operations pending queue (sem_pending) in turn, testing to see if the semphore operations will succeed this …

It interprets the commands the user types in and arranges for them to be carried out. The process of booting your Linux system can sometimes be easy and sometimes be difficult. Upgrading from one version to another is also painless. In addition to implementing the standard C library, glibc provides …

An interrupt driven device driver is one where the hardware device being controlled will raise a hardware interrupt whenever it needs to be serviced. Thus they are also called built-in commands. Most of the Linux kernel is written in the C programming language, with a little bit of assembly and …

But, as we all know, there are typically many directories on a system. In either case, the kernel simply resolves the pathname to the correct inode. The editing mode may be switched during interactive use by using the -o option to the set built-in command. Whereas sockets communicating over the …

The IDE disks are controlled by the IDE controller chip and the SCSI disks by the SCSI disk controller chips and so on. Press the B key to boot the system using the new values. The source code for Linux is under copyright by its many individual authors, and licensed …

Keep in mind that these are only conventions---not rules. It is time for the opening of the tools that will be needed to build this new age. Numerous such standards exist but, technically speaking, Linux does not officially comply with any of them. When using Linux, you often face configurations …

The Linux system call uses the write routine pointed at by the file data structure describing this pipe. If you have a /etc/cron.allow file, this supersedes cron.deny (ie, cron.deny is ignored) and allows only those listed in it to use cron. The only rule is that …

The character % introduces a job name. At kernel initialization time, the address families built into the kernel register themselves with the BSD socket interface. Both are very different from proprietary software (also commonly called commercial software), which is software that is controlled by a company or an individual. Source code …

When the kernel is asked to open a pathname like this, it walks each directory entry (called a dentry inside of the kernel) in the pathname to find the inode of the next entry. At the same time, many executives have a crude interpretation of its value to corporations?"It's …

Where the timers go in the timer table is statically defined (rather like the bottom half handler table bh_base). In fact, Richard Stallman wouldn't have bothered writing the GNU system if he thought his project wouldn't mean anything. In addition, in the open source world, vulnerabilities are discussed publicly, so …

Open source software isn't free from cost, of course. Where in I/O space the common peripherals (IDE controller, serial port, floppy disk controller and so on) have their registers has been set by convention over the years as the PC architecture has developed. Also there is no mechanism for …

The new module also exports symbols to the kernel and insmod builds a table of these exported images. Notably, Linux is the fastest growing operating system released to date. More importantly, Linux strives to behave in accordance with POSIX and SUS requirements. WinModems lack some basic hardware on the modem …

Linux and other open source projects built on top of it have helped to drive the a standardization of IT, allowing for more interoperability across the world's business environment. Many of the devices you own probably, such as Android phones, digital storage devices, personal video recorders, cameras, wearables, and more …

and insert it as the first line of your script. Arch Linux, the favorite Linux distribution of die-hard Linux enthusiasts, comes with Linux kernel and package manager. Linux keeps looking through the pending list from the start until there is a pass where no semaphore operations can be applied and …

As you can see, by use of scripting, any shell interaction can be automated and scripted. A typical Linux distribution includes the Linux kernel, but it also contains many application programs and tools. The device identifier for the first partition of that disk (/dev/hdb1) is (3,65). Knowledge and …

The inode is both a physical object, located on disk in Unix-style filesystems, and a conceptual entity, represented by a data structure in the Linux kernel. It may not be the best choice for word processing (or maybe it is -- read on), but many see it as an "ISP in …

The four bytes are written as four decimal numbers in the 0-255 range, separated by dots. In this case the waiting process will be suspended and another, more deserving process will be chosen to run. The most difficult part of the installation process is, without a doubt, partitioning the hard …

Newbies can directly cat crontab file to see the syntax in case they forget it. The API merely defines the interface; the piece of software that actually provides the API is known as the implementation of the API. There are editors, compilers and interpreters for nearly every language ever created …

This means that when the next process that attempts to access this memory gets a page fault, the shared memory fault handling code will use this newly created physical page for that process too. Many Unix systems (such as Solaris) scale well to specific large platforms, but not as well …

For example, you cannot unload the VFAT module if you have one or more VFAT file systems mounted. In fact, there is no difference between command execution directly via terminal or within a shell script apart from the fact that the shell script offers non-interactive execution of multiple commands as …

This modest computer's official Raspbian OS comes loaded with tons of programming tools, connector pins, and other useful ports. To accomplish more complex tasks, tools would simply be connected together, using pipes. For self study it can be useful to have a good introductory book. Organizations today do not need …

A server is a computer with an operating system that is configured to allow other computers to connect to it from across a network. Keep in mind that these are only conventions---not rules. Setting up TCP/IP connections is very different from setting up an amateur radio X.25 connection …

You need to start from the ground up, choose components, and build a customized operating system that could easily become a great Linux distro for programming and other development purposes. Each filesystem is mounted to a specific location in the namespace, known as a mount point. One who bases his …

An exit status of zero indicates success. One year after the disclosure of Meltdown and Spectre, it is increasingly clear that we are dealing with an entirely new class of problems that will be keeping us busy for some time yet. A CPU is a small but powerful semiconductor device …

The platters are attached to a central spindle and spin at a constant speed that can vary between 3000 and 10,000 RPM depending on the model. These applications are not going away anytime soon. When there are no more characters left to read, the device returns end-of-file (EOF). The …

The name is an acronym for the 'Bourne-Again SHell'. Track 0 is the outermost track and the highest numbered track is the track closest to the central spindle. If no output_file is supplied, output goes to stdout. The maximum file length, as with the maximum file position, is bounded only …

To help bring order to chaos, standards groups codify system interfaces into official standards. Many of the best Linux experts are self taught and do not possess a single computer certification. It needs to be able to support what an IT team requires in the moment and in the future …

Like the virtual filesystem, Linux abstracts the socket interface with the BSD socket layer being concerned with the BSD socket interface to the application programs which is in turn supported by independent address family specific software. This is especially important if a particularly vital application does not yet exist for …

True, they are often needed for one project or another and can be well worth the cost, but for a beginner or a learner -- and for many professionals -- free software is simply irreplaceable. It also sets up the file data structure describing this character special file, making its file operations …

The API user (generally, the higher-level software) has zero input into the API and its implementation. The file position starts at zero; it cannot be negative. Processes are generally associated with a user's login group, not any of the supplemental groups. (Even of the large corporately-funded developer base, many have …

There are many ways to make money, so why choose a method that requires investing just as much time and effort into making software that lots of people want to use as trying to prevent the usage of said software? Most shells offer a similar set of internal commands, but …

Mostly Linux kernel modules are device drivers, pseudo-device drivers such as network drivers, or file-systems. The IP protocol layer itself uses many different physical media to transport IP packets to other IP hosts. Software and other creative works enter the public domain only if the author deliberately surrenders the copyright …

The basics of Unix programming have existed untouched for decades. So, if the operation value is 2, then -2 is added to the adjustment entry for this semaphore. Linux provides kernel memory allocation and deallocation routines and it is these that the device drivers use. Relative to the on-CPU cache …

This hides the underlying differences from the generic system calls which read and write to ordinary files. It was a failure. When it boots, it automati- cally looks for a GRUB 2 bootloader image file named grubx64.efi, also in the uefi folder on the system. Windows 10 is perhaps …

Although directories are treated like normal files, the kernel does not allow them to be opened and manipulated like regular files. Any ethernet frame transmitted to that address will be received by the addressed host but ignored by all the other hosts connected to the network. Some operating systems, such …

It will even automatically look for requests for missing or non-existent web pages, known as 404s. Most of the servers that hold the entire internet are Linux-based for many reasons that will not be listed here. The access file logs every visit to your web site. The shell program is …

This integration would result in efficient administration. Filesystems usually exist physically (i.e., are stored on disk), although Linux also supports virtual filesystems that exist only in memory, and network filesystems that exist on machines across the network. Most processes consist of only a single thread; they are called single-threaded …