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.

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, ...

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) ...

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 ...

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 ...

Editors' Note: This article has been updated since its original posting. Software and hardware engineers who have to deal with byte and bit order issues know the process is like walking a maze. Though ...

The Linux command line is a text interface to your computer. Also known as shell, terminal, console, command prompts and many others, is a computer program intended to interpret commands. Allows users ...

Triggering scripts with incron and systemd. It is, at times, important to know when things change in the Linux OS. The uses to which systems are placed often include high-priority data that must be ...

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 ...

Nowadays, high-performance server software (for example, the HTTP accelerator) in most cases runs on multicore machines. Modern hardware could provide 32, 64 or more CPU cores. In such highly ...

Emacs is well known as an editor, but calling Emacs an editor is like calling the Queen Mary a boat. The source RPM for Emacs 21.1 is some 20MB—huge for an editor. You don't have to use all of it, but ...