Summary

This chapter exposed you to enough background to begin exploring the Linux kernel. Two methods of dynamic storage were introduced: the linked list and the binary search tree. Having a basic understanding of these structures helps you when, among many other topics, processes and paging are discussed. We then introduced the basics of assembly language to assist you in exploring or debugging down to the machine level and, focusing on an inline assembler, we showed the hybrid of C and assembler within the same function. We end this chapter with a discussion of various commands and functions that are necessary to study various aspects of the kernel.