My goal with this series is to make Linux internals more approachable, so I’m intentionally keeping each post narrow and avoiding details that would overwhelm readers at this stage.

The primary target audience of these blog posts are developers, and I have a progression plan in mind how to build up layer by layer the necessary knowledge they need to know to understand how they program work/interact with the other parts of the OS. The boot process or the exact composition of the kernel image is irrelevant here in my opinion, they wont need to touch them on a VPS for example or on their dev machine.

Regarding the kernel space/user space I did not write that the kernel space stopped, I will come back to it in the next post that will be about system calls, we will discuss there that when our programs interact with the kernel we are switching between user and kernel mode back and forth, with the syscall instruction (on x86-64 systems).

Anyway, I really appreciate your feedback and that you put effort into it, and thank you for reading the post! :)

3mo ago

Blog post: The Linux kernel is just a program

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zknd @lemmy.world 3mo ago

I am writing a blog post series to make this topic more approachable for others.

3mo ago

Blog post: The Linux kernel is just a program

Jump

zknd @lemmy.world 3mo ago

Thank you! :) Sure, working on it. :)

3mo ago

Blog post: The Linux kernel is just a program

Jump

zknd @lemmy.world 3mo ago

Thank you for the feedback. There is a post planned about the boot process that will include initramfs more thoroughly, but first I would like to build up the concepts from the kernel through the system calls, files/devices, to processes (so we can talk about that the programs you write interact with the hardware through syscalls, files/devices, etc). The primary targeted audience are developers, so they can better understand how their program works when it is deployed to a server (or on their dev machine).