Rating: 
Summary: now out of date, questionable accuracy even when it was new
Review: This book covers linux kernel version 2.2, kernel version 2.4 is not covered. There are trivial comments at the conclusion of each chapter "looking ahead to 2.4" which are nearly worthless.
There is no worthwhile discussion of ACLs (access control lists).Worst of all, even when the information was current it was of questionable accuracy. In the chapter discussing the VFS on page 334 there is a list of fields in the superblock object. Then compare this list to the list of the fields in the chapter discussing the ext2 filesystem superblock on page 499 and you will see great differences. Why is this? O'reilly needs to update this book. It's a good start, now finish it.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent Book on Unix/Linux kernel
Review: This book give indepth details about the Unix/Linux kernel.
Rating: 
Summary: Good book but not a good approach
Review: This book is definitely very good introduction to Linux kernel.
But the approach used in this book is not good.
I recommend it as reference material.
In my opinion, to teach S/W, the best way is
showing Data structures and how each data structure is related each other
in a big picture.
All you need to say is problem description, objective and data structure used to solve the problem and bried mechanism if necessary. In doing so, you don't have to say much. Just a few pictures are enough. But this book tries to explain some codes in words.
This is not good, boring and even frustrating. Instead, the authors should have excerpted actual source codes.Most chapters are written this way, so for newbies, this will be really boring.
This is a good reference for existing code not a good introduction to kernel components.
Rating:
Summary: Best of the worst
Review: This book is probably the best book around, but it's still not what it should be. The authors emphasize a lot on assembly language but never bother to explain the big picture. What might have helped is a short chapter on C and assembly language interfacing, and just a road map of function calls with a detailed description of data structures, locking, and deadlock conditions. More emphasis should have been given to tricky things like bh, tasklets, and softirqs (which is absent). At many places the book is ambiguous. For example, if process A is running when an interrupt comes that will eventually wake up process B -- which kernel stack does this interrupt use? A or B. Well not too difficult to figure out, but the book should point these little things out rather than making general statements like "the IF flags are saved on the stack" -- everyone knows its saved on the stack, but which one? There is no shortcut to reading the source code so there is no point in explaining one zillion times that mov a, b will move a to b. BTW the author never explains various things that gcc and ld implicitly do to the final image (e.g., how is the function table for do_initcalls created and populated and why does the order of linking change the initialization process. etc etc) I regret buying the book and I wish I had spent my time and money on grepping and buying coffee. Read the DJASM guide to gcc and assembly and use any source navigator to browse through the source. Its far simpler that way -- and you are uptodate with the kernel releases. happy hacking!
Rating: 
Summary: A fantastic book for linux kernel fans and hackers
Review: This book is very nicely written. This book will solve the purpose for beginners as well as for experts. I had the source code for linux, but i couldnt find a way to delve into the finer details and associate it with the architectural details of x86. This book helped me achieve that. This book builds up a required base hardware/software for each topic and then delves into the finer details. I suggest referring the Intel systems programming manuals before/during reading this book. Pavan
Rating:
Summary: simply the best
Review: This is the linux kernel book thar makes the difference. Although I 've tried some other books on the subject it was "Understanding the Linux kernel" that gave me some answers to my questions. It covers anything (ok, except networking, it is the core kernel book) from booting to other topics with lots of diagrams.
Rating:
Summary: simply the best
Review: This is the linux kernel book thar makes the difference. Although I 've tried some other books on the subject it was "Understanding the Linux kernel" that gave me some answers to my questions. It covers anything (ok, except networking, it is the core kernel book) from booting to other topics with lots of diagrams.
Rating:
Summary: kernel for everyone
Review: Understanding the Linux Kernel, now is possible with a simple, easy readable wonderful new book.
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