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© Copyright IBM Corp. 2007. All rights reserved. 1
Draft Document for Review May 4, 2007 11:35 am 4285ch01.fm
Chapter 1. Understanding the Linux
operating system
We begin this Redpaper with a quick overview of how the Linux operating system handles its
tasks to complete interacting with its hardware resources. Performance tuning is a difficult
task that requires in-depth understanding of the hardware, operating system, and application.
If performance tuning were simple, the parameters we are about to explore would be
hard-coded into the firmware or the operating system and you would not be reading these
lines. However, as shown in the following figure, server performance is affected by multiple
factors.
Figure 1-1 Schematic interaction of different performance components
1
Applications
Libraries
Kernel
Drivers
Firmware
Hardware
Applications
Libraries
Kernel
Drivers
Firmware
Hardware