Linux Track

This track brings the practical and systems-focused material from the lb2 Linux book into the placement preparation knowledge base. It complements, rather than replaces, the conceptual Operating Systems section: use the OS section to learn the models, and use this track to operate, debug, secure, and profile a real Linux system.

Suggested progression

1. Foundations and history — understand Unix/Linux, distributions, POSIX, and the kernel’s development model.
2. Shell and commands — become fluent with pipelines, quoting, text processing, find, xargs, sed, awk, and Bash scripting.
3. System programming — connect processes, system calls, IPC, ELF, dynamic linking, epoll, and io_uring to OS theory.
4. Administration and networking — practise users, permissions, packages, services, storage, routing, DNS, SSH, TLS, and firewalling.
5. Observability and performance — form hypotheses with /proc, tracing, perf, eBPF, flame graphs, and the USE method before changing code.
6. Security, containers, kernel, and virtualization — study capabilities, namespaces, cgroups, seccomp, LSMs, KVM, drivers, filesystems, and kernel synchronization.

Placement-focused additions

The imported book is intentionally navigated as a Linux deep dive. The short Linux Tools for Placement Preparation chapter is an original bridge for interview revision: it groups the commands by the question they answer, gives safe examples, and records common traps. The imported chapters then provide the deeper reference material for each area.

How to use the material

• Run commands in a disposable VM or container when they modify networking, mounts, users, services, or kernel state.
• Check the local manual page (man command) because options vary by GNU, util-linux, BusyBox, and BSD implementations.
• Prefer read-only inspection first: observe with ps, ss, ip, df, findmnt, /proc, and tracing tools before applying a change.
• Treat examples containing sudo, rm, kill, firewall rules, or mounts as demonstrations, not copy-paste production procedures.
• Follow links within this track for depth, then cross back to OS, Networks, Security, Storage, and Cloud chapters for the interview-level trade-offs.

Source and reference policy

The educational Markdown was imported from lb2 without its Git history, workflows, generated output, JavaScript/CSS deployment files, or repository metadata. Relative links were rewritten to the integrated paths; stale source links were converted to nearby explanatory text rather than left broken.

Primary references used for the original additions and for checking current command behaviour:

• Linux kernel documentation
• Linux man-pages project
• GNU Coreutils manual
• GNU Findutils manual
• Bash Reference Manual
• Open Group POSIX utilities
• systemd documentation
• eBPF documentation
• curl documentation
• OpenSSH manuals

See the individual chapters for topic-specific references.