Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
7.0 Introduction
The kernel is the heart of the Linux operating system. It's the software that takes the low-
level requests, such as reading or writing files, or reading and writing general-purpose in-
put/output (GPIO) pins, and maps them to the hardware. When you install a new version of
the OS (
Recipe 1.3
), you get a certain version of the kernel.
You usually won't need to mess with the kernel, but sometimes you might want to try
something new that requires a different kernel. This chapter shows how to switch kernels.
The nice thing is you can have multiple kernels on your system at the same time and select
from among them which to boot up.
NOTE
We assume here that you are logged on to your Bone as
root
and superuser privileges. You
also need to be logged in to your Linux host computer as a nonsuperuser.
