Linux Device Drivers, 2nd Edition

EBook Description: As the popularity of the Linux system continues to grow, the interest in writing Linux device drivers steadily increases. Most of Linux is independent of the hardware it runs on, and most users can be (happily) unaware of hardware issues. But, for each piece of hardware supported by Linux, somebody somewhere has written a driver to make it work with the system. Without device drivers, there is no functioning system. Device drivers take on a special role in the Linux kernel. They are distinct 'black boxes' that make a particular piece of hardware respond to a well-defined internal programming interface; they hide completely the details of how the device works. User activities are performed by means of a set of standardized calls that are independent of the specific driver; mapping those calls to device-specific operations that act on real hardware is then the role of the device driver. This programming interface is such that drivers can be built separately from the rest of the kernel, and 'plugged in' at runtime when needed. This modularity makes Linux drivers easy to write, to the point that there are now hundreds of them available.

The FreeBSD newcomer will find that the first section of this book guides the user through the FreeBSD installation process and gently introduces the concepts and conventions that underpin UNIX. Working through this section requires little more than the desire to explore, and the ability to take on board new concepts as they are introduced. Once you have traveled this far, the second, far larger, section of the Handbook is a comprehensive reference to all manner of topics of interest to FreeBSD system administrators. Some of these chapters may recommend that you do some prior reading, and this is noted in the synopsis at the beginning of each chapter.

Kerberos Interoperability Issues

Kerberos is a secure authentication protocol for use in distributed computing environments. When used ubiquitously within a computing environment it can also provide single sign-on capabilities.

On Designing a Database for Integrated User Management: Pitfalls and Possibilities

Decisions on implementing IT systems have often been departmental or isolated in nature. As a result many organizations now are faced with the challenge of integrating different networks and computers (in different departments or possibly even within each), each managed by a different operating system, and each running different types of applications

Archipelago: An Island-Based File System for Highly Available and Scalable Internet Services

NT clusters are an important tool for large I/O-intensive applications such as file servers, Web servers, and other Internet services. A wide variety of research projects on cluster file systems have explored approaches to building cluster file systems that provide high availability and scalability.

Publius: A Robust, Tamper-Evident, Censorship-Resistant, and Source Anonymous

We describe a system that we have designed and implemented for publishing content on the web. Our publishing scheme has the property that it is very difficult for any adversary to censor or modify the content

PVFS: A Parallel File System for Linux Clusters

As Linux clusters have matured as platforms for low-cost, high-performance parallel computing, software packages to provide many key services have emerged, especially in areas such as message passing and networking. One area devoid of support, however, has been parallel file systems, which are critical for high-performance I/O on such clusters

Deployme: Tellme's Software and Content Manager

The package philosophy behind these tools is easily extended to rapidly changing content. However, we found these systems to be incomplete because they only cover one or two stages of the package update lifecycle.

IO-Lite: A Unified I/O Buffering and Caching System

For many users, the perceived speed of computing is increasingly dependent on the performance of networked server systems, underscoring the need for high performance servers. Unfortunately, general purpose operating systems provide inadequate support for server applications, leading to poor server performance and increased hardware cost of server systems.

Automatic I/O Hint Generation through Speculative Execution

Many applications, ranging from simple text search utilities to complex databases, issue large numbers of file access requests that cannot always be serviced by in-memory caches. Due to the disparity between processor speeds and disk access times, the execution times of these applications are often dominated by I/O latency

Resource Containers: A New Facility for Resource Management in Server Systems

Networked servers have become one of the most important applications of large computer systems. For many users, the perceived speed of computing is governed by server performance. We are especially interested in the performance of Web servers, since these must often scale to thousands or millions of users.

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