Chapter 15. Kernel (Topic 1.5)

In the early days of personal computing, operating systems were simple interfaces, designed to provide access to a rudimentary filesystem and to launch programs. Once a program was running, it had full control of the system. This made the system simple but also contributed to instability, because a single program failure could cause the entire system to crash. To run a computer in an organized and reliable fashion, it is important to isolate physical hardware resources from the software running on the system. In Linux, the kernel is the core software that owns and manages your system. It controls hardware, memory, and process scheduling, and provides an interface for programs to indirectly access hardware resources.

This Topic on the Linux kernel has two Objectives:

Objective 1: Manage Kernel Modules at Runtime

This Objective covers kernel modules and the commands for managing them. Weight: 3.

Objective 2: Reconfigure, Build, and Install a Custom Kernel and Modules

This Objective describes the creation of new kernels using your existing kernel source code as provided in your Linux distribution. Weight: 4.