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...

• Current: a kernel variable which points to the task_struct structure of the process currently running on this CPU.
• ISR: interrupt service routine, the function in each device driver that gets called when an interrupt happens.
• 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, see the [http://lxr.linux.no/ident?i=schedule schedule()] function.

• System call: (also: syscall) the way a program transitions from userspace into kernel space, to call a kernel space function.
• 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.