Linux Secrets!

1. Linux uses COW scheme with virtual memory management.
2. Threads in Linux can be LinuxThreads, NPTL(Redhat). NPTL is more efficient and from kernel 2.6 onwards it'll be used. Using env variable LD_ASSUME_KERNEL you can decide which thread library to choose.
3. Linux kernel do not discriminate between threads and processes while making scheduling decision.
4. Memory allocation of a process can be seen with 'pmap' command.
5. Linux CPU scheduler is O(1) scheduler i.e. regardless of number of processes, it always take a constant time to select a process.
6. Linux memory management for IA-32 can address only 1GB of physical memory. Beyond this memory has to mapped to the 1GB range hence allocation a page beyond 1GB degrades performance.
7. IA64 can address 64-128GB of memory.
8. Linux allocates most part of the disk's free space to swap. This improves the performance of VMM.
9. It follows Buddy System for page allocation which try to keep memory address contiguous. Have a loot at /proc/buddyinfo.
10. If no free page is available, kswapd kernel thread reclaims free pages. This thread is used by buddy system and follows LRU. Kernel pages are never swapped out of memory.