Interfaces of the Linux kernel

The GNU C Library, commonly known as glibc, is the GNU Project implementation of the C standard library. It provides a wrapper around the system calls of the Linux kernel and other kernels for application use. Despite its name, it now also directly supports C++ (and, indirectly, other programming languages). It was started in the 1980s by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for the GNU operating system.

software framework

a standard for Linux distributions

interface to a device driver that appears in a file system as if it were an ordinary file; e.g. /dev/* in Unix-like systems; CON, PRN, NUL in DOS/Windows

udev (userspace ) is a device manager and a device API set for the Linux kernel. As the successor of devfsd and hotplug, udev primarily manages device nodes in the directory. At the same time, udev also handles all user space events raised when hardware devices are added into the system or removed from it, including firmware loading as required by certain devices. udev was developed by Greg Kroah-Hartman and Kay Sievers, with much help from Dan Stekloff, among others.

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musl is a C standard library intended for operating systems based on the Linux kernel, released under the MIT License. It was developed by Rich Felker to write a clean, efficient, and standards-conformant libc implementation.

implementation of the standard C library for Android operating system

subsystem of the Linux kernel for graphics

The proc filesystem (procfs) is a special filesystem in Unix-like operating systems that presents information about processes and other system information in a hierarchical file-like structure, providing a more convenient and standardized method for dynamically accessing process data held in the kernel than traditional tracing methods or direct access to kernel memory. Typically, it is mapped to a mount point named /proc at boot time. The proc file system acts as an interface to internal data structures about running processes in the kernel. In Linux, it can also be used to obtain information

Video4Linux (V4L for short) is a collection of device drivers and an API for supporting realtime video capture on Linux systems. It supports USB webcams, TV tuners, CSI cameras, and related devices, standardizing their output, so programmers can easily add video support to their applications.

cgroups (abbreviated from control groups) is a Linux kernel feature that limits, accounts for, and isolates the resource usage (CPU, memory, disk I/O, etc.) of a collection of processes.

sysfs is a pseudo file system provided by the Linux kernel that exports information about various kernel subsystems, hardware devices, and associated device drivers from the kernel's device model to user space through virtual files. In addition to providing information about various devices and kernel subsystems, exported virtual files are also used for their configuration.

dietlibc is a C standard library subset released under the GNU General Public License Version 2, and proprietary licenses are also available. It was developed with the help of about 100 volunteers by Felix von Leitner with the goal to compile and link programs to the smallest possible size. dietlibc was developed from scratch and thus only implements the most important and commonly used functions. It is mainly used in embedded devices.

abstraction layer for Linux kernel to show graphics on the system console

Newlib is a C standard library implementation intended for use on embedded systems. It is a conglomeration of several library parts, all under free software licenses that make them easily usable on embedded products.

overview and comparison of the Linux kernel API's and ABI's

thumb|Evdev and libevdev form a prominent part of the Linux API.

feature of the Linux kernel that partitions resources

application binary interface (ABI) of the Linux kernel

In computing, klibc is a minimalistic subset of the standard C library developed by H. Peter Anvin. It was developed mainly to be used during the Linux startup process, and it is part of the early user space, i.e. components used during kernel startup, but which do not run in kernel mode. These components do not have access to the standard library (usually glibc or musl) used by normal userspace programs.