Acknowledgments

This book, of course, was not written in a vacuum; we would like to thank the many people who have helped to make it possible.

Thanks to our editor, Andy Oram; this book is a vastly better product as a result of his efforts. And obviously we owe a lot to the smart people who have laid the philosophical and practical foundations of the current free software renaissance.

The first edition was technically reviewed by Alan Cox, Greg Hankins, Hans Lermen, Heiko Eissfeldt, and Miguel de Icaza (in alphabetic order by first name). The technical reviewers for the second edition were Allan B. Cruse, Christian Morgner, Jake Edge, Jeff Garzik, Jens Axboe, Jerry Cooperstein, Jerome Peter Lynch, Michael Kerrisk, Paul Kinzelman, and Raph Levien. Reviewers for the third edition were Allan B. Cruse, Christian Morgner, James Bottomley, Jerry Cooperstein, Patrick Mochel, Paul Kinzelman, and Robert Love. Together, these people have put a vast amount of effort into finding problems and pointing out possible improvements to our writing.

Last but certainly not least, we thank the Linux developers for their relentless work. This includes both the kernel programmers and the user-space people, who often get forgotten. In this book, we chose never to call them by name in order to avoid being unfair to someone we might forget. We sometimes made an exception to this rule and called Linus by name; we hope he doesn't mind.

Jon

I must begin by thanking my wife Laura and my children Michele and Giulia for filling my life with joy and patiently putting up with my distraction while working on this edition. The subscribers of LWN.net have, through their generosity, enabled much of this work to happen. The Linux kernel developers have done me a great service by letting me be a part of their community, answering my questions, and setting me straight when I got confused. Thanks are due to readers of the second edition of this book whose comments, offered at Linux gatherings over much of the world, have been gratifying and inspiring. And I would especially like to thank Alessandro Rubini for starting this whole exercise with the first edition (and staying with it through the current edition); and Greg Kroah-Hartman, who has brought his considerable skills to bear on several chapters, with great results.

Alessandro

I would like to thank the people that made this work possible. First of all, the incredible patience of Federica, who went as far as letting me review the first edition during our honeymoon, with a laptop in the tent. I want to thank Giorgio and Giulia, who have been involved in later editions of the book and happily accepted to be sons of "a gnu" who often works late in the night. I owe a lot to all the free-software authors who actually taught me how to program by making their work available for anyone to study. But for this edition, I'm mostly grateful to Jon and Greg, who have been great mates in this work; it couldn't have existed without each and both of them, as the code base is bigger and tougher, while my time is a scarcer resource, always contended for by clients, free software issues, and expired deadlines. Jon has been a great leader for this edition; both have been very productive and technically invaluable in supplementing my small-scale and embedded view toward programming with their expertise about SMP and number crunchers.

Greg

I would like to thank my wife Shannon and my children Madeline and Griffin for their understanding and patience while I took the time to work on this book. If it were not for their support of my original Linux development efforts, I would not be able to do this book at all. Thanks also to Alessandro and Jon for offering to let me work on this book; I am honored that they let me participate in it. Much gratitude is given to all of the Linux kernel programmers, who were unselfish enough to write code in the public view, so that I and others could learn so much from just reading it. Also, for everyone who has ever sent me bug reports, critiqued my code, and flamed me for doing stupid things, you have all taught me so much about how to be a better programmer and, throughout it all, made me feel very welcome to be part of this community. Thank you.