Section 1.8. Kernel Organization

1.8. Kernel Organization

Linux supports numerous architecturesthis means that it can be run on many types of processors, which include alpha, arm, i386, ia64, ppc, ppc64, and s390x. The Linux source code is packaged to include support for all these architectures. Most of the source code is written in C and is hardware independent. A portion of the code is heavily hardware dependent and is written in a mix of C and assembly for the particular architecture. The heavily machine-dependent portion is wrapped by a long list of system calls that serve as an interface. As you read this book, you get a chance to see that the architecture-dependent portions of the code are generally involved with system initialization and bootstrapping, exception vector handling, address translation, and device I/O.