Who should attend: Application programmers and kernel developers. You should be reasonably familiar with C programming in the UNIX environment, but no prior experience with the UNIX or Linux kernel code is assumed.

This tutorial will give you an introduction to the structure of the Linux kernel, the basic features it provides, and the most important algorithms it employs.

The Linux kernel aims to achieve conformance with existing standards and compatibility with existing operating systems; however, it is not a reworking of existing UNIX kernel code. The Linux kernel was written from scratch to provide both standard and novel features, and takes advantage of the best practice of existing UNIX kernel designs.

Although the material will focus on the recently released new stable version of the Linux kernel (version 2.2), it will also address aspects of the previous, still widely used version 2.0 codebase where that differs substantially from the new version. It will not contain any detailed examination of the source code but will rather offer an overview and roadmap of the kernel's design and functionality.

Topics will include:

	How the Linux kernel is organized: scheduler, virtual memory system, filesystem layers, device driver layers and networking stacks  The interface between each module and the rest of the kernel, and the functionality provided by that interface  The common kernel support functions and algorithms used by that module  How modules provide for multiple implementations of similar functionality (network protocols, filesystem types, device drivers and architecture-specific machine interfaces)
	Basic ground rules of kernel programming, such as races and deadlock conditions
	Implementation of the most important kernel algorithms and their general properties (aspects of portability, performance and functionality)
	The main similarities and differences between Linux and traditional UNIX kernels, with attention to places where Linux implements significantly different algorithms
	Details of the Linux scheduler, its VM system, and the ext2fs filesystem
	The strict requirements for ensuring that kernel code is portable between the many architectures that Linux supports