After this documentation was released in July 2003, I was approached by Prentice Hall and asked to write a book on the Linux VM under the Bruce Peren's Open Book Series.

The book is available and called simply "Understanding The Linux Virtual Memory Manager". There is a lot of additional material in the book that is not available here, including details on later 2.4 kernels, introductions to 2.6, a whole new chapter on the shared memory filesystem, coverage of TLB management, a lot more code commentary, countless other additions and clarifications and a CD with lots of cool stuff on it. This material (although now dated and lacking in comparison to the book) will remain available although I obviously encourge you to buy the book from your favourite book store :-) . As the book is under the Bruce Perens Open Book Series, it will be available 90 days after appearing on the book shelves which means it is not available right now. When it is available, it will be downloadable from http://www.phptr.com/perens so check there for more information.

To be fully clear, this webpage is not the actual book.

1.5 Companion CD

A companion CD is available and should be included with this thesis if it is provided by University of Limerick. At time of writing, it is not publicly available but when it is, it will be available for download at http://www.csn.ul.ie/$\sim$mel/projects/vm/. The CD is designed to be used under Linux and mounted on /cdrom with the command

mel@joshua:/$ mount /dev/cdrom /cdrom -o exec

The mount point and options are only important if you wish to start the web server that is installed on the CD. Please note that the default options normally used for mounting CDs may not allow the server to start. The CD has three important components:

• A web server is available which is started by /cdrom/start_server. After starting it, the URL to access it is http://localhost:10080. It has been tested with Red Hat 7.3 and Debian Woody;

• The ``Code Commentary'' companion document and this thesis are available from the /cdrom/docs/ directory in HTML, PDF and plain text formats;

• The VM Regress, gengraph and patchset packages which are discussed in Chapter 2 are available in /cdrom/software. gcc-3.0.1 is also provided as it is required for building gengraph.

1.5.1 Companion CD Web Server

An unmodified copy of Apache 1.3.27 (http://www.apache.org/) has been built and configured to run from the CD which must be mounted on /cdrom/. To start it, run the script /cdrom/start_server. If there are no errors, the output should look like:

mel@joshua:~$ /cdrom/start_server
Starting Apache Server: done
The URL to access is http://localhost:10080/

The URL supplied is a small web site which allows easy browsing of the CD. The most noteworthy feature of the web site is a local running copy of the LXR (see Section 2.1.2) which allows the Linux source code to be browsed as a web page with hyperlinks for functions and identifiers. It greatly simplifies source code browsing.

To shutdown the server, execute the script /cdrom/stop_server and the CD may be unmounted.

1.5.2 Code Commentary Companion Document

The companion document is a considerably sized document. As opposed to including it as a large appendix, it is available from the companion CD in PDF, HTML and plain text formats in the /cdrom/docs directory and links are on the companion CD's web site. It is also available at http://www.csn.ul.ie/$\sim$mel/projects/vm/.