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Networking and Linux are terms that are almost synonymous. In a very real sense Linux is a product of the Internet or World Wide Web (WWW). Its developers and users use the web to exchange information ideas, code, and Linux itself is often used to support the networking needs of organizations. This chapter describes how Linux supports the network protocols known collectively as TCP/IP.

The TCP/IP protocols were designed to support communications between computers connected to the ARPANET, an American research network funded by the US government. The ARPANET pioneered networking concepts such as packet switching and protocol layering where one protocol uses the services of another. ARPANET was retired in 1988 but its successors (NSF¹ NET and the Internet) have grown even larger. What is now known as the World Wide Web grew from the ARPANET and is itself supported by the TCP/IP protocols. Unix ^TM was extensively used on the ARPANET and the first released networking version of Unix ^TM was 4.3 BSD. Linux's networking implementation is modeled on 4.3 BSD in that it supports BSD sockets (with some extensions) and the full range of TCP/IP networking. This programming interface was chosen because of its popularity and to help applications be portable between Linux and other Unix ^TM platforms.

This chapter describes how the Linux kernel maintains the files in the file systems that it supports. It describes the Virtual File System (VFS) and explains how the Linux kernel's real file systems are supported.

One of the most important features of Linux is its support for many different file systems. This makes it very flexible and well able to coexist with many other operating systems. At the time of writing, Linux supports 15 file systems; ext, ext2, xia, minix, umsdos, msdos, vfat, proc, smb, ncp, iso9660, sysv, hpfs, affs and ufs, and no doubt, over time more will be added.

In Linux, as it is for Unix ^TM, the separate file systems the system may use are not accessed by device identifiers (such as a drive number or a drive name) but instead they are combined into a single hierarchical tree structure that represents the file system as one whole single entity. Linux adds each new file system into this single file system tree as it is mounted. All file systems, of whatever type, are mounted onto a directory and the files of the mounted file system cover up the existing contents of that directory. This directory is known as the mount directory or mount point. When the file system is unmounted, the mount directory's own files are once again revealed.

This chapter looks at how interrupts are handled by the Linux kernel. Whilst the kernel has generic mechanisms and interfaces for handling interrupts, most of the interrupt handling details are architecture specific.

 

 

Figure 7.1: A Logical Diagram of Interrupt Routing

 

Linux uses a lot of different pieces of hardware to perform many different tasks. The video device drives the monitor, the IDE device drives the disks and so on. You could drive these devices synchronously, that is you could send a request for some operation (say writing a block of memory out to disk) and then wait for the operation to complete. That method, although it would work, is very inefficient and the operating system would spend a lot of time ``busy doing nothing'' as it waited for each operation to complete. A better, more efficient, way is to make the request and then do other, more useful work and later be interrupted by the device when it has finished the request. With this scheme, there may be many outstanding requests to the devices in the system all happening at the same time.

Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI), as its name implies is a standard that describes how to connect the peripheral components of a system together in a structured and controlled way. The standard describes the way that the system components are electrically connected and the way that they should behave. This chapter looks at how the Linux kernel initializes the system's PCI buses and devices.

 

 

Figure 6.1: Example PCI Based System

 

Processes communicate with each other and with the kernel to coordinate their activities. Linux supports a number of Inter-Process Communication (IPC) mechanisms. Signals and pipes are two of them but Linux also supports the System V IPC mechanisms named after the Unix ^TM release in which they first appeared.

 

5.1 Signals

Signals are one of the oldest inter-process communication methods used by Unix ^TM systems. They are used to signal asynchronous events to one or more processes. A signal could be generated by a keyboard interrupt or an error condition such as the process attempting to access a non-existent location in its virtual memory. Signals are also used by the shells to signal job control commands to their child processes.

There are a set of defined signals that the kernel can generate or that can be generated by other processes in the system, provided that they have the correct privileges. You can list a system's set of signals using the kill command (kill -l), on my Intel Linux box this gives: