Mauerer fack.tex V4 - 09/04/2008 3:36pm Page ixAcknowledgments
First and foremost, I have to thank the thousands of programmers who have created the Linux kernel
over the years — most of them commercially based, but some also just for their own private or academic
joy. Without them, there would be no kernel, and I would have had nothing to write about. Please accept
my apologies that I cannot list all several hundred names here, but in true UNIX style, you can easily
generate the list by:
for file in $ALL_FILES_COVERED_IN_THIS_BOOK; dogit log --pretty="format:%an" $file; done |sort -u -k 2,It goes without saying that I admire your work very much — you are all the true heroes in this story!
What you are reading right now is the result of an evolution over more than seven years: After two years
of writing, the first edition was published in German by Carl Hanser Verlag in 2003. It then described
kernel 2.6.0. The text was used as a basis for the low-level design documentation for the EAL4+ security
evaluation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, requiring to update it to kernel 2.6.18 (if the EAL acronym
does not mean anything to you, then Wikipedia is once more your friend). Hewlett-Packard sponsored
the translation into English and has, thankfully, granted the rights to publish the result. Updates to kernel
2.6.24 were then performed specifically for this book.
Several people were involved in this evolution, and my appreciation goes to all of them: Leslie Mackay-
Poulton, with support from David Jacobs, did a tremendous job at translating a huge pile of text into
English. I’m also indebted to Sal La Pietra of atsec information security for pulling the strings to get the
translation project rolling, and especially to Stephan Muller for close cooperation during the evaluation. ̈
My cordial thanks also go to all other HP and Red Hat people involved in this evaluation, and also to
Claudio Kopper and Hans L ̈ohr for our very enjoyable cooperation during this project. Many thanks also
go to the people at Wiley — both visible and invisible to me — who helped to shape the book into its
current form.
The German edition was well received by readers and reviewers, but nevertheless comments about
inaccuracies and suggestions for improvements were provided. I’m glad for all of them, and would also
like to mention the instructors who answered the publisher’s survey for the original edition. Some of their
suggestions were very valuable for improving the current publication. The same goes for the referees for
this edition, especially to Dr. Xiaodong Zhang for providing numerous suggestions for Appendix F.4.
Furthermore, I express my gratitude to Dr. Christine Silberhorn for granting me the opportunity to
suspend my regular research work at the Max Planck Research Group for four weeks to work on this
project. I hope you enjoyed the peace during this time when nobody was trying to install Linux on your
MacBook!
As with every book, I owe my deepest gratitude to my family for supporting me in every aspect of
life — I more than appreciate this indispensable aid. Finally, I have to thank Hariet Fabritius for infinite