Module 20: The Linux System

■ History
■ Design Principles
■ Kernel Modules
■ Process Management
■ Scheduling
■ Memory Management
■ File Systems
■ Input and Output
■ Interprocess Communication
■ Network Structure
■ Security

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 History
■ Linux is a modem, free operating system based on UNIX
standards.
■ First developed as a small but self-contained kernel in
1991 by Linus Torvalds, with the major design goal of
UNIX compatibility.
■ Its history has been one of collaboration by many users
from all around the world, corresponding almost
exclusively over the Internet.
■ It has been designed to run efficiently and reliably on
common PC hardware, but also runs on a variety of other
platforms.
■ The core Linux operating system kernel is entirely
original, but it can run much existing free UNIX software,
resulting in an entire UNIX-compatible operating system
free from proprietary code.

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 The Linux Kernel
■ Version 0.01 (May 1991) had no networking, ran only on
80386-compatible Intel processors and on PC hardware,
had extremely limited device-drive support, and
supported only the Minix file system.
■ Linux 1.0 (March 1994) included these new features:
✦ Support for UNIX’s standard TCP/IP networking protocols
✦ BSD-compatible socket interface for networking
programming
✦ Device-driver support for running IP over an Ethernet
✦ Enhanced file system
✦ Support for a range of SCSI controllers for
high-performance disk access
✦ Extra hardware support
■ Version 1.2 (March 1995) was the final PC-only Linux
kernel.

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 Linux 2.0

■ Released in June 1996, 2.0 added two major new

capabilities:
✦ Support for multiple architectures, including a fully 64-bit
native Alpha port.
✦ Support for multiprocessor architectures
■ Other new features included:
✦ Improved memory-management code
✦ Improved TCP/IP performance
✦ Support for internal kernel threads, for handling
dependencies between loadable modules, and for automatic
loading of modules on demand.
✦ Standardized configuration interface
■ Available for Motorola 68000-series processors, Sun
Sparc systems, and for PC and PowerMac systems.

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 The Linux System

■ Linux uses many tools developed as part of Berkeley’s

BSD operating system, MIT’s X Window System, and the
Free Software Foundation's GNU project.
■ The min system libraries were started by the GNU
project, with improvements provided by the Linux
community.
■ Linux networking-administration tools were derived from
4.3BSD code; recent BSD derivatives such as Free BSD
have borrowed code from Linux in return.
■ The Linux system is maintained by a loose network of
developers collaborating over the Internet, with a small
number of public ftp sites acting as de facto standard
repositories.

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 Linux Distributions

■ Standard, precompiled sets of packages, or distributions,

include the basic Linux system, system installation and
management utilities, and ready-to-install packages of
common UNIX tools.
■ The first distributions managed these packages by simply
providing a means of unpacking all the files into the
appropriate places; modern distributions include
advanced package management.
■ Early distributions included SLS and Slackware. Red Hat
and Debian are popular distributions from commercial
and noncommercial sources, respectively.
■ The RPM Package file format permits compatibility
among the various Linux distributions.

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 Linux Licensing

■ The Linux kernel is distributed under the GNU General

Public License (GPL), the terms of which are set out by
the Free Software Foundation.
■ Anyone using Linux, or creating their own derivative of
Linux, may not make the derived product proprietary;
software released under the GPL may not be
redistributed as a binary-only product.

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 Design Principles

■ Linux is a multiuser, multitasking system with a full set of

UNIX-compatible tools..
■ Its file system adheres to traditional UNIX semantics, and
it fully implements the standard UNIX networking model.
■ Main design goals are speed, efficiency, and
standardization.
■ Linux is designed to be compliant with the relevant
POSIX documents; at least two Linux distributions have
achieved official POSIX certification.
■ The Linux programming interface adheres to the SVR4
UNIX semantics, rather than to BSD behavior.

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 Components of a Linux System

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Components of a Linux System (Cont.)

■ Like most UNIX implementations, Linux is composed of

three main bodies of code; the most important distinction
between the kernel and all other components.
■ The kernel is responsible for maintaining the important
abstractions of the operating system.
✦ Kernel code executes in kernel mode with full access to all
the physical resources of the computer.
✦ All kernel code and data structures are kept in the same
single address space.

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Components of a Linux System (Cont.)

■ The system libraries define a standard set of functions

through which applications interact with the kernel, and
which implement much of the operating-system
functionality that does not need the full privileges of
kernel code.
■ The system utilities perform individual specialized
management tasks.

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 Kernel Modules
■ Sections of kernel code that can be compiled, loaded, and
unloaded independent of the rest of the kernel.
■ A kernel module may typically implement a device driver, a
file system, or a networking protocol.
■ The module interface allows third parties to write and
distribute, on their own terms, device drivers or file
systems that could not be distributed under the GPL.
■ Kernel modules allow a Linux system to be set up with a
standard, minimal kernel, without any extra device drivers
built in.
■ Three components to Linux module support:
✦ module management
✦ driver registration
✦ conflict resolution

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 Module Management

■ Supports loading modules into memory and letting them

talk to the rest of the kernel.
■ Module loading is split into two separate sections:
✦ Managing sections of module code in kernel memory
✦ Handling symbols that modules are allowed to reference
■ The module requestor manages loading requested, but
currently unloaded, modules; it also regularly queries the
kernel to see whether a dynamically loaded module is still
in use, and will unload it when it is no longer actively
needed.

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 Driver Registration

■ Allows modules to tell the rest of the kernel that a new

driver has become available.
■ The kernel maintains dynamic tables of all known drivers,
and provides a set of routines to allow drivers to be added
to or removed from these tables at any time.
■ Registration tables include the following items:
✦ Device drivers
✦ File systems
✦ Network protocols
✦ Binary format

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 Conflict Resolution

■ A mechanism that allows different device drivers to

reserve hardware resources and to protect those
resources from accidental use by another driver
■ The conflict resolution module aims to:
✦ Prevent modules from clashing over access to hardware
resources
✦ Prevent autoprobes from interfering with existing device
drivers
✦ Resolve conflicts with multiple drivers trying to access the
same hardware

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 Process Management

■ UNIX process management separates the creation of

processes and the running of a new program into two
distinct operations.
✦ The fork system call creates a new process.
✦ A new program is run after a call to execve.
■ Under UNIX, a process encompasses all the information
that the operating system must maintain t track the
context of a single execution of a single program.
■ Under Linux, process properties fall into three groups:
the process’s identity, environment, and context.

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 Process Identity
■ Process ID (PID). The unique identifier for the process;
used to specify processes to the operating system when
an application makes a system call to signal, modify, or
wait for another process.
■ Credentials. Each process must have an associated
user ID and one or more group IDs that determine the
process’s rights to access system resources and files.
■ Personality. Not traditionally found on UNIX systems,
but under Linux each process has an associated
personality identifier that can slightly modify the
semantics of certain system calls.
Used primarily by emulation libraries to request that
system calls be compatible with certain specific flavors of
UNIX.

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 Process Environment

■ The process’s environment is inherited from its parent,

and is composed of two null-terminated vectors:
✦ The argument vector lists the command-line arguments
used to invoke the running program; conventionally starts
with the name of the program itself
✦ The environment vector is a list of “NAME=VALUE” pairs
that associates named environment variables with arbitrary
textual values.
■ Passing environment variables among processes and
inheriting variables by a process’s children are flexible
means of passing information to components of the user-
mode system software.
■ The environment-variable mechanism provides a
customization of the operating system that can be set on
a per-process basis, rather than being configured for the
system as a whole.

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 Process Context

■ The (constantly changing) state of a running program at

any point in time.
■ The scheduling context is the most important part of the
process context; it is the information that the scheduler
needs to suspend and restart the process.
■ The kernel maintains accounting information about the
resources currently being consumed by each process,
and the total resources consumed by the process in its
lifetime so far.
■ The file table is an array of pointers to kernel file
structures. When making file I/O system calls, processes
refer to files by their index into this table.

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 Process Context (Cont.)

■ Whereas the file table lists the existing open files, the
file-system context applies to requests to open new
files. The current root and default directories to be used
for new file searches are stored here.
■ The signal-handler table defines the routine in the
process’s address space to be called when specific
signals arrive.
■ The virtual-memory context of a process describes the
full contents of the its private address space.

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 Processes and Threads

■ Linux uses the same internal representation for

processes and threads; a thread is simply a new process
that happens to share the same address space as its
parent.
■ A distinction is only made when a new thread is created
by the clone system call.
✦ fork creates a new process with its own entirely new
process context
✦ clone creates a new process with its own identity, but that is
allowed to share the data structures of its parent
■ Using clone gives an application fine-grained control over
exactly what is shared between two threads.

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 Scheduling

■ The job of allocating CPU time to different tasks within an

operating system.
■ While scheduling is normally thought of as the running
and interrupting of processes, in Linux, scheduling also
includes the running of the various kernel tasks.
■ Running kernel tasks encompasses both tasks that are
requested by a running process and tasks that execute
internally on behalf of a device driver.

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 Kernel Synchronization

■ A request for kernel-mode execution can occur in two

ways:
✦ A running program may request an operating system
service, either explicitly via a system call, or implicitly, for
example, when a page fault occurs.
✦ A device driver may deliver a hardware interrupt that causes
the CPU to start executing a kernel-defined handler for that
interrupt.
■ Kernel synchronization requires a framework that will
allow the kernel’s critical sections to run without
interruption by another critical section.

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 Kernel Synchronization (Cont.)

■ Linux uses two techniques to protect critical sections:

1. Normal kernel code is nonpreemptible
– when a time interrupt is received while a process is
executing a kernel system service routine, the kernel’s
need_resched flag is set so that the scheduler will run
once the system call has completed and control is
about to be returned to user mode.
2. The second technique applies to critical sections that occur
in an interrupt service routines.
– By using the processor’s interrupt control hardware to
disable interrupts during a critical section, the kernel
guarantees that it can proceed without the risk of concurrent
access of shared data structures.

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 Kernel Synchronization (Cont.)

■ To avoid performance penalties, Linux’s kernel uses a

synchronization architecture that allows long critical
sections to run without having interrupts disabled for the
critical section’s entire duration.
■ Interrupt service routines are separated into a top half
and a bottom half.
✦ The top half is a normal interrupt service routine, and runs
with recursive interrupts disabled.
✦ The bottom half is run, with all interrupts enabled, by a
miniature scheduler that ensures that bottom halves never
interrupt themselves.
✦ This architecture is completed by a mechanism for disabling
selected bottom halves while executing normal, foreground
kernel code.

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 Interrupt Protection Levels

■ Each level may be interrupted by code running at a

higher level, but will never be interrupted by code
running at the same or a lower level.
■ User processes can always be preempted by another
process when a time-sharing scheduling interrupt
occurs.
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 Process Scheduling

■ Linux uses two process-scheduling algorithms:

✦ A time-sharing algorithm for fair preemptive scheduling
between multiple processes
✦ A real-time algorithm for tasks where absolute priorities
are more important than fairness
■ A process’s scheduling class defines which algorithm to
apply.
■ For time-sharing processes, Linux uses a prioritized,
credit based algorithm.
✦ The crediting rule

credits
credits := + priority
2
factors in both the process’s history and its priority.
✦ This crediting system automatically prioritizes interactive
or I/O-bound processes.

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 Process Scheduling (Cont.)

■ Linux implements the FIFO and round-robin real-time

scheduling classes; in both cases, each process has a
priority in addition to its scheduling class.
✦ The scheduler runs the process with the highest priority; for
equal-priority processes, it runs the longest-waiting one
✦ FIFO processes continue to run until they either exit or block
✦ A round-robin process will be preempted after a while and
moved to the end of the scheduling queue, so that round-
robing processes of equal priority automatically time-share
between themselves.

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 Symmetric Multiprocessing

■ Linux 2.0 was the first Linux kernel to support SMP

hardware; separate processes or threads can execute in
parallel on separate processors.
■ To preserve the kernel’s nonpreemptible synchronization
requirements, SMP imposes the restriction, via a single
kernel spinlock, that only one processor at a time may
execute kernel-mode code.

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 Memory Management

■ Linux’s physical memory-management system deals with

allocating and freeing pages, groups of pages, and small
blocks of memory.
■ It has additional mechanisms for handling virtual memory,
memory mapped into the address space of running
processes.

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 Splitting of Memory in a Buddy Heap

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 Managing Physical Memory
■ The page allocator allocates and frees all physical pages; it
can allocate ranges of physically-contiguous pages on
request.
■ The allocator uses a buddy-heap algorithm to keep track of
available physical pages.
✦ Each allocatable memory region is paired with an adjacent
partner.
✦ Whenever two allocated partner regions are both freed up they
are combined to form a larger region.
✦ If a small memory request cannot be satisfied by allocating an
existing small free region, then a larger free region will be
subdivided into two partners to satisfy the request.
■ Memory allocations in the Linux kernel occur either statically
(drivers reserve a contiguous area of memory during system
boot time) or dynamically (via the page allocator).

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 Virtual Memory

■ The VM system maintains the address space visible to

each process: It creates pages of virtual memory on
demand, and manages the loading of those pages from
disk or their swapping back out to disk as required.
■ The VM manager maintains two separate views of a
process’s address space:
✦ A logical view describing instructions concerning the layout
of the address space.
The address space consists of a set of nonoverlapping
regions, each representing a continuous, page-aligned
subset of the address space.
✦ A physical view of each address space which is stored in
the hardware page tables for the process.

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 Virtual Memory (Cont.)

■ Virtual memory regions are characterized by:

✦ The backing store, which describes from where the pages
for a region come; regions are usually backed by a file or by
nothing (demand-zero memory)
✦ The region’s reaction to writes (page sharing or copy-on-
write).
■ The kernel creates a new virtual address space
1. When a process runs a new program with the exec system
call
2. Upon creation of a new process by the fork system call

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 Virtual Memory (Cont.)

■ On executing a new program, the process is given a new,

completely empty virtual-address space; the program-
loading routines populate the address space with virtual-
memory regions.
■ Creating a new process with fork involves creating a
complete copy of the existing process’s virtual address
space.
✦ The kernel copies the parent process’s VMA descriptors,
then creates a new set of page tables for the child.
✦ The parent’s page tables are copies directly into the child’s,
with the reference count of each page covered being
incremented.
✦ After the fork, the parent and child share the same physical
pages of memory in their address spaces.

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 Virtual Memory (Cont.)

■ The VM paging system relocates pages of memory from

physical memory out to disk when the memory is needed
for something else.
■ The VM paging system can be divided into two sections:
✦ The pageout-policy algorithm decides which pages to write
out to disk, and when.
✦ The paging mechanism actually carries out the transfer, and
pages data back into physical memory as needed.

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 Virtual Memory (Cont.)

■ The Linux kernel reserves a constant, architecture-

dependent region of the virtual address space of every
process for its own internal use.
■ This kernel virtual-memory area contains two regions:
✦ A static area that contains page table references to every
available physical page of memory in the system, so that
there is a simple translation from physical to virtual
addresses when running kernel code.
✦ The reminder of the reserved section is not reserved for any
specific purpose; its page-table entries can be modified to
point to any other areas of memory.

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Executing and Loading User Programs

■ Linux maintains a table of functions for loading programs;

it gives each function the opportunity to try loading the
given file when an exec system call is made.
■ The registration of multiple loader routines allows Linux to
support both the ELF and a.out binary formats.
■ Initially, binary-file pages are mapped into virtual memory;
only when a program tries to access a given page will a
page fault result in that page being loaded into physical
memory.
■ An ELF-format binary file consists of a header followed by
several page-aligned sections; the ELF loader works by
reading the header and mapping the sections of the file
into separate regions of virtual memory.

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 Memory Layout for ELF Programs

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 Static and Dynamic Linking

■ A program whose necessary library functions are

embedded directly in the program’s executable binary file
is statically linked to its libraries.
■ The main disadvantage of static linkage is that every
program generated must contain copies of exactly the
same common system library functions.
■ Dynamic linking is more efficient in terms of both physical
memory and disk-space usage because it loads the
system libraries into memory only once.

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 File Systems

■ To the user, Linux’s file system appears as a hierarchical

directory tree obeying UNIX semantics.
■ Internally, the kernel hides implementation details and
manages the multiple different file systems via an
abstraction layer, that is, the virtual file system (VFS).
■ The Linux VFS is designed around object-oriented
principles and is composed of two components:
✦ A set of definitions that define what a file object is allowed to
look like
✔ The inode-object and the file-object structures represent
individual files
✔ the file system object represents an entire file system
✦ A layer of software to manipulate those objects.

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 The Linux Ext2fs File System
■ Ext2fs uses a mechanism similar to that of BSD Fast
File System (ffs) for locating data blocks belonging to a
specific file.
■ The main differences between ext2fs and ffs concern
their disk allocation policies.
✦ In ffs, the disk is allocated to files in blocks of 8Kb, with
blocks being subdivided into fragments of 1Kb to store
small files or partially filled blocks at the end of a file.
✦ Ext2fs does not use fragments; it performs its allocations
in smaller units. The default block size on ext2fs is 1Kb,
although 2Kb and 4Kb blocks are also supported.
✦ Ext2fs uses allocation policies designed to place logically
adjacent blocks of a file into physically adjacent blocks on
disk, so that it can submit an I/O request for several disk
blocks as a single operation.

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 Ext2fs Block-Allocation Policies

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 The Linux Proc File System

■ The proc file system does not store data, rather, its
contents are computed on demand according to user file
I/O requests.
■ proc must implement a directory structure, and the file
contents within; it must then define a unique and
persistent inode number for each directory and files it
contains.
✦ It uses this inode number to identify just what operation is
required when a user tries to read from a particular file
inode or perform a lookup in a particular directory inode.
✦ When data is read from one of these files, proc collects the
appropriate information, formats it into text form and places
it into the requesting process’s read buffer.

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 Input and Output

■ The Linux device-oriented file system accesses disk

storage through two caches:
✦ Data is cached in the page cache, which is unified with the
virtual memory system
✦ Metadata is cached in the buffer cache, a separate cache
indexed by the physical disk block.
■ Linux splits all devices into three classes:
✦ block devices allow random access to completely
independent, fixed size blocks of data
✦ character devices include most other devices; they don’t
need to support the functionality of regular files.
✦ network devices are interfaced via the kernel’s networking
subsystem

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 Device-driver Block Structure

Operating System Concepts 20.46 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne 2002

 Block Devices

■ Provide the main interface to all disk devices in a system.

■ The block buffer cache serves two main purposes:
✦ it acts as a pool of buffers for active I/O
✦ it serves as a cache for completed I/O
■ The request manager manages the reading and writing of
buffer contents to and from a block device driver.

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 Character Devices

■ A device driver which does not offer random access to

fixed blocks of data.
■ A character device driver must register a set of functions
which implement the driver’s various file I/O operations.
■ The kernel performs almost no preprocessing of a file
read or write request to a character device, but simply
passes on the request to the device.
■ The main exception to this rule is the special subset of
character device drivers which implement terminal
devices, for which the kernel maintains a standard
interface.

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 Interprocess Communication

■ Like UNIX, Linux informs processes that an event has

occurred via signals.
■ There is a limited number of signals, and they cannot
carry information: Only the fact that a signal occurred is
available to a process.
■ The Linux kernel does not use signals to communicate
with processes with are running in kernel mode, rather,
communication within the kernel is accomplished via
scheduling states and wait.queue structures.

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 Passing Data Between Processes

■ The pipe mechanism allows a child process to inherit a

communication channel to its parent, data written to one
end of the pipe can be read a the other.
■ Shared memory offers an extremely fast way of
communicating; any data written by one process to a
shared memory region can be read immediately by any
other process that has mapped that region into its
address space.
■ To obtain synchronization, however, shared memory
must be used in conjunction with another Interprocess-
communication mechanism.

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 Shared Memory Object

■ The shared-memory object acts as a backing store for

shared-memory regions in the same way as a file can act
as backing store for a memory-mapped memory region.
■ Shared-memory mappings direct page faults to map in
pages from a persistent shared-memory object.
■ Shared-memory objects remember their contents even if
no processes are currently mapping them into virtual
memory.

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 Network Structure

■ Networking is a key area of functionality for Linux.

✦ It supports the standard Internet protocols for UNIX to UNIX
communications.
✦ It also implements protocols native to nonUNIX operating
systems, in particular, protocols used on PC networks, such
as Appletalk and IPX.
■ Internally, networking in the Linux kernel is implemented
by three layers of software:
✦ The socket interface
✦ Protocol drivers
✦ Network device drivers

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 Network Structure (Cont.)

■ The most important set of protocols in the Linux

networking system is the internet protocol suite.
✦ It implements routing between different hosts anywhere on
the network.
✦ On top of the routing protocol are built the UDP, TCP and
ICMP protocols.

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 Security

■ The pluggable authentication modules (PAM) system is

available under Linux.
■ PAM is based on a shared library that can be used by any
system component that needs to authenticate users.
■ Access control under UNIX systems, including Linux, is
performed through the use of unique numeric identifiers
(uid and gid).
■ Access control is performed by assigning objects a
protections mask, which specifies which access
modes—read, write, or execute—are to be granted to
processes with owner, group, or world access.

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 Security (Cont.)

■ Linux augments the standard UNIX setuid mechanism in

two ways:
✦ It implements the POSIX specification’s saved user-id
mechanism, which allows a process to repeatedly drop and
reacquire its effective uid.
✦ It has added a process characteristic that grants just a
subset of the rights of the effective uid.
■ Linux provides another mechanism that allows a client to
selectively pass access to a single file to some server
process without granting it any other privileges.

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 Device-driver Block Structure

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