ALSA stands for the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture. It consists of a set of kernel drivers, an application programming interface (API) library and utility programs for supporting sound under Linux.

As more people and companies start to write Linux kernel code, understanding acceptable kernel programming coding style and conventions is very important. This article starts out by explaining the ...

Since the earliest days of microprocessors, system designers have been plagued by a problem in which the speed of the CPU's operation exceeded the bandwidth of the memory subsystem to which it was ...

Editors' Note: This article has been updated since its original posting. Software and hardware engineers who have to deal with byte and bit order issues know the process is like walking a maze. Though ...

Have you ever wondered how system calls can be intercepted? Have you ever tried fooling the kernel by changing system call arguments? Have you ever wondered how debuggers stop a running process and ...

Nowadays, high-performance server software (for example, the HTTP accelerator) in most cases runs on multicore machines. Modern hardware could provide 32, 64 or more CPU cores. In such highly ...

One amazing thing about Linux is that the same code base is used for a different range of computing systems, from supercomputers to very tiny embedded devices. If you stop for a second and think about ...

A scene in Star Wars being edited in ILM's proprietary compositing package CompTime. ILM created its own compositor rather than using a commercial package such as Shake or RAYZ. “Linux is increasing ...

In the early twentieth century, Heinrich Schenker developed a method of analyzing tonal music that ties a piece's melody, harmony and form to a simple underlying musical idea. To illustrate his theory ...

On Linux kernel programming mailing lists oriented toward new developers (see the on-line Resources), a number of common questions are asked. Almost every time one of these questions is asked, the ...

A vDSO (virtual dynamic shared object) is an alternative to the somewhat cycle-expensive system call interface that the GNU/Linux kernel provides. But, before I explain how to cook up your own vDSO, ...

If you usually work with non-trivial C sources, you may have wondered which execution path (that is, which sequence of function calls) brought you to a certain point in your program. Also, it would be ...