A glossary of various terms and acronyms related to the Linux kernel. If you know something, please create yourself an account (UserPreferences) and add a term in alphabetical order. If everybody who reads this page adds a term each week, this glossary should be complete within a few months...

• ISR: interrupt service routine
• MMU: memory management unit, part of the CPU that is needed for virtual memory.
• Scheduler: the part of the kernel that chooses a suitable process to run on the cpu.
• Page table: data structure used by the MMU to translate virtual memory addresses to physical memory addresses.
• Process descriptor: kernel data structure that describes/accounts proces data related to a single process.
• Virtual memory: every process in the system gets its own memory address space, independant of the other processes.