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In computing, a device driver is a computer program that operates or controls a particular type of device that is attached to a computer or automaton. A driver provides a software interface to hardware devices, enabling operating systems and other computer programs to access hardware functions without needing to know precise details about the hardware being used.
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs.
A Beowulf cluster is a computer cluster of what are normally identical, commodity-grade computers networked into a small local area network with libraries and programs installed which allow processing to be shared among them. The result is a high-performance parallel computing cluster from inexpensive personal computer hardware.
NetWare is a discontinued computer network operating system developed by Novell, Inc. It initially used cooperative multitasking to run various services on a personal computer, using the IPX network protocol.
Nagios Core, formerly known as Nagios, is a free and open-source computer-software application that monitors systems, networks and infrastructure. Nagios offers monitoring and alerting services for servers, switches, applications and services. It alerts users when things go wrong and alerts them a second time when the problem has been resolved.
Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP) is a free and open source terminal server for Linux that allows many people to simultaneously use the same computer. Applications run on the server with a terminal known as a thin client handling input and output. Generally, terminals are low-powered, lack a hard disk and are quieter and more reliable than desktop computers because they do not have any moving parts.
The architecture of Windows NT, a line of operating systems produced and sold by Microsoft, is a layered design that consists of two main components, user mode and kernel mode. It is a preemptive, reentrant multitasking operating system, which has been designed to work with uniprocessor and symmetrical multiprocessor (SMP)-based computers. To process input/output (I/O) requests, they use packet-driven I/O, which utilizes I/O request packets (IRPs) and asynchronous I/O. Starting with Windows XP, Microsoft began making 64-bit versions of Windows available; before this, there were only 32-bit versions of these operating systems.
inotify is a Linux kernel subsystem created by John McCutchan, which monitors changes to the filesystem, and reports those changes to applications. It can be used to automatically update directory views, reload configuration files, log changes, backup, synchronize, and upload. The inotifywait and inotifywatch commands allow using the inotify subsystem from the command line. One major use is in desktop search utilities like Beagle, where its functionality permits reindexing of changed files without scanning the filesystem for changes every few minutes, which would be very inefficient.
dnotify is a file system event monitor for the Linux kernel, one of the subfeatures of the fcntl call. It was introduced in the 2.4 kernel series. It has been obsoleted by inotify, but will be retained for compatibility reasons.
In Linux systems, initrd is a scheme for loading a temporary root file system into memory, to be used as part of the Linux startup process. initrd and initramfs refer to two different methods of achieving this. Both are commonly used to make preparations before the real root file system can be mounted.
OpenVZ is an operating-system-level virtualization technology for Linux. It allows a physical server to run multiple isolated operating system instances, called containers, virtual private servers (VPSs), or virtual environments (VEs). OpenVZ is similar to Solaris Containers and LXC.
The following is a timeline of virtualization development. In computing, virtualization is the use of a computer to simulate another computer. Through virtualization, a host simulates a guest by exposing virtual hardware devices, which may be done through software or by allowing access to a physical device connected to the machine.
Linux startup process is the multi-stage initialization process performed during booting a Linux installation. It is in many ways similar to the BSD and other Unix-style boot processes, from which it derives.
nmon is a computer performance system monitor tool for the AIX and Linux operating systems. The nmon tool has two modes a) displays the performance stats on-screen in a condensed format or b) the same stats are saved to a comma-separated values (CSV) data file for later graphing and analysis to aid the understanding of computer resource use, tuning options and bottlenecks.
In computing, entropy is the randomness collected by an operating system or application for use in cryptography or other uses that require random data. This randomness is often collected from hardware sources, either pre-existing ones such as mouse movements or specially provided randomness generators. A lack of entropy can have a negative impact on performance and security.
A process is a program in execution. An integral part of any modern-day operating system (OS). The OS must allocate resources to processes, enable processes to share and exchange information, protect the resources of each process from other processes and enable synchronization among processes. To meet these requirements, the OS must maintain a data structure for each process, which describes the state and resource ownership of that process, and which enables the OS to exert control over each process.
The FSEvents API in macOS allows applications to register for notifications of changes to a given directory tree. Whenever the filesystem is changed, the kernel passes notifications via the special device file /dev/fsevents to a userspace process called fseventsd. This process combines multiple changes to a single directory tree that occur within a short period of time, then notifies applications that have registered for changes to the affected directory.
The kernel is a computer program at the core of a computer's operating system and generally has complete control over everything in the system. It is the portion of the operating system code that is always resident in memory, and facilitates interactions between hardware and software components. A full kernel controls all hardware resources via device drivers, arbitrates conflicts between processes concerning such resources, and optimizes the utilization of common resources e.g. CPU & cache usage, file systems, and network sockets. On most systems, the kernel is one of the first programs loaded on startup. It handles the rest of startup as well as memory, peripherals, and input/output (I/O) requests from software, translating them into data-processing instructions for the central processing unit.
Kqueue is a scalable event notification interface introduced in FreeBSD 4.1 on July 2000, also supported in NetBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFly BSD, and macOS. Kqueue was originally authored in 2000 by Jonathan Lemon, then involved with the FreeBSD Core Team. Kqueue makes it possible for software like nginx to solve the c10k problem.
Linux on IBM Z is the collective term for the Linux operating system compiled to run on IBM mainframes, especially IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE servers. Similar terms which imply the same meaning are Linux on zEnterprise, Linux on zSeries, Linux/390, Linux/390x, etc. The three Linux distributions certified for usage on the IBM Z hardware platform are Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise, and Ubuntu.
