Julia Evans

Things to learn about Linux

I asked on Twitter today what Linux things they would like to know more about. I thought the replies were really cool so here’s a list (many of them could be discussed on any Unixy OS, some of them are Linux-specific)

  • tcp/ip & networking stuff
  • what is a port/socket?
  • seccomp
  • systemd
  • IPC (interprocess communication, pipes)
  • permissions, setuid, sticky bits, how does chown work
  • how the shell uses fork & exec
  • how can I make my computer a router?
  • process groups, session leaders, shell job control
  • memory allocation, how do heaps work, what does malloc do?
  • ttys, how do terminals work
  • process scheduling
  • drivers
  • what’s the difference between Linux and Unix
  • the kernel
  • modern X servers
  • how does X11 work?
  • Linux’s zero-copy API (sendfile, splice, tee)
  • what is dmesg even doing
  • how kernel modules work
  • embedded stuff: realtime, GPIO, etc
  • btrfs
  • QEMU/KVM
  • shell redirection
  • HAL
  • chroot
  • filesystems & inodes
  • what is RSS, how do I know how much memory my process is using
  • iptables
  • what is a network interface exactly?
  • what is syslog and how does it work?
  • how are logs usually organized?
  • virtual memory
  • BPF
  • bootloader, initrd, kernel parameters
  • the ip command
  • what are all the files that are not file files (/dev, stdin, /proc, /sys)
  • dbus
  • sed and awk
  • namespaces, cgroups, docker, SELinux, AppArmor
  • debuggers
  • what’s the difference between threads and processes?
  • if unix is text-based, how do desktop environments like GNOME fit in?
  • how does the “man” system work.
  • kpatch, kgraph, kexec
  • more about the stack. Are C vars really stack slots? How tf do setjmp and longjmp work?
  • package management
  • mounts and vfs

this is great for so many reasons!

  1. I need to draw 11 more drawings about Linux this month and these are such great ideas
  2. there are many things I don’t know on this list and it’s a cool reminder of how much interesting stuff there still is to learn! A few of these I barely even know what they are (dbus, SELinux) or only have a pretty sketchy notion (seccomp, how X11 works, many more)
  3. it’s also a cool reminder of how far I’ve come – I at least know where to start with most of the things on this list, even if I definitely could not explain a lot of them in detail without looking some stuff up.

Also I sometimes want to remind people that you too could write interesting blog posts / drawings on the internet – for instance “what is dmesg even doing” is an interesting topic, and totally possible to learn about! (I just read dmesg on Wikipedia and now I know more!)

"A Critique of the CAP Theorem" More drawings about computers