Kernel Internals

Purpose

Guide agents through Linux kernel internals: the CFS and EEVDF schedulers, runqueues and vruntime, the buddy allocator and SLUB, vmalloc vs kmalloc, VFS dentry/inode/file objects, page cache and readahead, memory zones, OOM killer heuristics, and /proc/meminfo interpretation.

When to Use

• Diagnosing scheduling latency or unfair CPU distribution
• Understanding kmalloc failures vs vmalloc for large kernel allocations
• Analyzing page cache behavior and readahead effectiveness
• Interpreting /proc/meminfo during memory pressure
• Debugging OOM killer victim selection
• Reading kernel source in kernel/sched/, mm/, or fs/

Workflow

1. Scheduler — CFS and EEVDF