I am not a fan of initial ramdisks (initrds in Linux jargon), but eversince I discovered Solaris 10's version of the concept I've thought itwas the most sensible approach to the whole issue. Just having all the drivers in the boot archive, rather than trying to pick out the onesthe system thinks it will need, eliminates one entire set of annoyingproblems.

(The other Linux initrd problem is where the kernel version doesn'tmatch the version of modules in the initrd;

Modern versions of Python let you process each line in a file in asimple way, with just ' for line in fp: .. ', replacing either manual while loops with .readline() or the memory inefficiency of letting .readlines() pull the entire thing into memory. But there's twobugs, both of which can be illustrated by running a 'pycat' program:

import sysfor line in sys.stdin:    sys.stdout.write(line)

If you run this without standard

There are actually two memory layouts for 32-bit x86 Linux programs; theold and the new one. First, the simple version of the common bits:

• first off, the 4Gb address space is split into the lower 3G, for theprocess, and the upper 1G, for the kernel.
• the program's code, data, and bss start at 128 Mb (0x08048000)and go upwards.
• the stack grows down