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| Weight | 2 |
| Description | Candidates should be able to utilize kernel components that are necessary to specific hardware, hardware drivers, system resources and requirements. This objective includes implementing different types of kernel images, understanding stable and long term kernels and patches, as well as using kernel modules. |
Key Knowledge Areas:
- Kernel 2.6.x documentation
- Kernel 3.x documentation
The following is a partial list of the used files, terms and utilities:
- /usr/src/linux
- /usr/src/linux/Documentation
- zImage
- bzImage
Moving into the directory /usr/src we should be able to view sub-directories that match the kernel sources that we have installed. If we do not have nay installed then the directory may be empty. In CentOS you can install the kernel source for your current kernel from the repositories using:
yum install kernel-source
Although you may not even want the source code the documentation for the kernel will be provided with the source code, along with header files that may be required for to compile other software.
If you add your own kernel source by downloading the latest kernel from kernel.org it should expanded to the directory:
/usr/src/linux-3.14.3
Or similar based on the kernel version being used, we should also create a sumbolic link called /usr/src/linux that links to the version directory that we are using. Software will normally check for the directory /usr/share/linux.
ln -s /usr/src/linux-3.14.3 /usr/src/linux
Documentation is always important and you can access it in the directory /usr/src/linux/Documentation :
The kernel itself can be located in the /boot directory. If the file name begins vmlinuz this would normal show that this is a bzImage file, the compression algorithm used when creating the image. This style of kernel is most common now as an older format zImage was limited to 512KiB.