How RH Linux Boots :: Fundamental Kernel Initialization


The fundamental kernel initialization is boring in that it is largely invariant: there is (almost) nothing you can do to change its actions.  This is possible because each CPU type requires its own kernel and in turn the kernel restricts its attention to a small, well understood hardware core.

Incidentally, kernels are typically compressed and prepended with a decompression routine.

Kernel initialization highlights include:
 


The kernel now reclaims certain RAM areas used only during boot-time kernel initialization.  It does this with some sneaky compiler tricks and a funny restart, after which, it resumes life as the Idle Task/Scheduler.
 

In essence, kernel initialization does two things: start the core system of shared resource managers (RAM, processor and mass storage); and start a single process, /sbin/init.



boot_partition

index

init_&_inittab