GNU is an extensive collection of free software, which can be used as an operating system or can be used in parts with other operating systems. The use of the completed GNU tools led to the family of operating systems popularly known as Linux. Most of GNU is licensed under the GNU Project's own General Public License (GPL).
A Linux distribution is an operating system made from a software collection that includes the Linux kernel and often a package management system. Linux users usually obtain their operating system by downloading one of the Linux distributions, which are available for a wide variety of systems ranging from embedded devices and personal computers to powerful supercomputers.
ifconfig is a system administration utility in Unix-like operating systems for network interface configuration.
IP aliasing is associating more than one IP address to a network interface. With this, one node on a network can have multiple connections to a network, each serving a different purpose.
Netlink is a socket family used for inter-process communication (IPC) between both the kernel and userspace processes, and between different userspace processes, in a way similar to the Unix domain sockets available on certain Unix-like operating systems, including its original incarnation as a Linux kernel interface, as well as in the form of a later implementation on FreeBSD. Similarly to the Unix domain sockets, and unlike INET sockets, Netlink communication cannot traverse host boundaries. However, while the Unix domain sockets use the file system namespace, Netlink sockets are usually addressed by process identifiers (PIDs).
PulseAudio is a network-capable sound server program distributed via the freedesktop.org project. It runs mainly on Linux, including Windows Subsystem for Linux on Microsoft Windows and Termux on Android; various BSD distributions such as FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and macOS; as well as Illumos distributions and the Solaris operating system. It serves as a middleware in between applications and hardware and handles raw PCM audio streams.
In the context of free and open-source software, proprietary software only available as a binary executable is referred to as a blob or binary blob. The term usually refers to a device driver module loaded into the kernel of an open-source operating system, and is sometimes also applied to code running outside the kernel, such as system firmware images, microcode updates, or userland programs. The term blob was first used in database management systems to describe a collection of binary data stored as a single entity.
Linux is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution (distro), which includes the kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses and recommends the name "GNU/Linux" to emphasize the use and importance of GNU software in many distributions, causing some controversy.
nftables is a subsystem of the Linux kernel providing filtering and classification of network packets/datagrams/frames. It has been available since Linux kernel 3.13 released on 19 January 2014.
According to the Free Software Foundation Latin America, Linux-libre is a modified version of the Linux kernel that contains no binary blobs, obfuscated code, or code released under proprietary licenses. In the Linux kernel, they are mostly used for proprietary firmware images. While generally redistributable, binary blobs do not give the user the freedom to audit, modify, or, consequently, redistribute their modified versions. The GNU Project keeps Linux-libre in synchronization with the mainline Linux kernel.
ethtool is the primary means in Linux kernel-based operating systems for displaying and modifying the parameters of network interface controllers (NICs) and their associated device driver software from application programs running in userspace.
Illumos is a partly free and open-source Unix operating system. It is based on OpenSolaris, which was based on System V Release 4 (SVR4) and the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). Illumos comprises a kernel, device drivers, system libraries, and utility software for system administration. This core is now the base for many different open-sourced Illumos distributions, in a similar way in which the Linux kernel is used in different Linux distributions.
cgroups is a Linux kernel feature that limits, accounts for, and isolates the resource usage of a collection of processes.
tc is the user-space system administration utility program used to configure the Linux kernel packet scheduler. Tc is usually packaged as part of the iproute2 package.
netsniff-ng is a free Linux network analyzer and networking toolkit originally written by Daniel Borkmann. Its gain of performance is reached by zero-copy mechanisms for network packets, so that the Linux kernel does not need to copy packets from kernel space to user space via system calls such as recvmsg . libpcap, starting with release 1.0.0, also supports the zero-copy mechanism on Linux for capturing (RX_RING), so programs using libpcap also use that mechanism on Linux.
perf is a performance analyzing tool in Linux, available from Linux kernel version 2.6.31 in 2009. Userspace controlling utility, named perf, is accessed from the command line and provides a number of subcommands; it is capable of statistical profiling of the entire system.
A network scheduler, also called packet scheduler, queueing discipline (qdisc) or queueing algorithm, is an arbiter on a node in a packet switching communication network. It manages the sequence of network packets in the transmit and receive queues of the protocol stack and network interface controller. There are several network schedulers available for the different operating systems, that implement many of the existing network scheduling algorithms.
Distributed Overlay Virtual Ethernet (DOVE) is a tunneling and virtualization technology for computer networks, created and backed by IBM. DOVE allows creation of network virtualization layers for deploying, controlling, and managing multiple independent and isolated network applications over a shared physical network infrastructure.
Parrot OS is a Linux distribution based on Debian with a focus on security, privacy, and development.
MX Linux is a Linux distribution based on Debian stable and using core antiX components, with additional software created or packaged by the MX community. The development of MX Linux is a collaborative effort between the antiX and former MEPIS communities. The MX 'name' comes from the M for MEPIS and the X from antiX – an acknowledgment of their roots. The community's stated goal is to produce "a family of operating systems that are designed to combine elegant and efficient desktops with high stability and solid performance".
