ALSA stands for the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture. It consists of a set of kernel drivers, an application programming interface (API) library and utility programs for supporting sound under Linux.

GRUB: it's neither larva, fast food nor the loveliest of acronyms in the GNU herd of free software. Rather, GRUB is the GNU GRand Unified Bootloader. And, it is truly the greatest loader for booting ...

Linking is the process of combining various pieces of code and data together to form a single executable that can be loaded in memory. Linking can be done at compile time, at load time (by loaders) ...

Since the 2.0 kernel release, Linux has supported a large number of SMP systems based on a variety of CPUs. Linux has done an excellent job of abstracting differences among these CPUs, even in kernel ...

Whether you are creating a small Internet appliance, some hardware instrumentation, data loggers or an army of autonomous robots to do your bidding, in numerous situations you need the flexibility of ...

In last month's article, we saw how the Linux input subsystem worked inside the kernel, ending with a quick mention of the event handlers. Each handler essentially provides a different user-space API, ...

For ease of management, it can be useful to keep related but different sets of files in separate locations. Users, however, often prefer to see these related files together. In this situation, ...

In this article, we explore the optimization levels provided by the GCC compiler toolchain, including the specific optimizations provided in each. We also identify optimizations that require explicit ...

If you've written any amount of bash code, you've likely come across the trap command. Trap allows you to catch signals and execute code when they occur. Signals are asynchronous notifications that ...

Due to the complexity of developing and maintaining the kernel, only the most essential and performance-critical code are placed in the kernel. Other things, such as GUI, management and control code, ...

Have you ever wondered how system calls can be intercepted? Have you ever tried fooling the kernel by changing system call arguments? Have you ever wondered how debuggers stop a running process and ...

Cloud infrastructure providers like Amazon Web Service sell virtual machines. EC2 revenue is expected to surpass $1B in revenue this year. That's a lot of VMs. It's not hard to see why there is such ...