Low-Level Linux: Memory, Syscalls, and Performance Tuning from the Metal Up

Modern applications live or die by performance, reliability, and efficiency — yet most developers never truly understand what happens after their code hits the kernel. Low-Level Linux takes you beneath abstractions and frameworks and into the machinery that actually runs your software.

This book is a practical, deeply technical guide to how Linux works from the metal up — from virtual memory and page tables to syscalls, scheduling, and performance tuning at scale.

Whether you’re optimizing high-throughput systems, debugging impossible latency spikes, or preparing for kernel-level work, this book gives you the mental models used by elite systems engineers.

You will learn how Linux really behaves under load — not just how it’s supposed to.

Inside you’ll master: How Linux virtual memory actually works
(paging, MMUs, TLBs, NUMA, and page faults demystified)

The full syscall lifecycle
from user space → kernel → hardware → back again

How context switching, scheduling, and interrupts impact latency

Memory allocation internals
(slab, slub, vmalloc, brk, mmap)

CPU caches, false sharing, and cache-line–level optimization

Diagnosing real performance problems using
perf, ftrace, strace, bcc, and eBPF

Why “fast code” is often slow — and how to prove it

How to reason about performance using first principles, not guesswork

Who this book is for: Software engineers ready to go beyond frameworks

Linux users who want to understand what their system is truly doing

Backend, infrastructure, and systems engineers

Performance engineers and SREs

Anyone who wants to think like the kernel does

No fluff. No hand-waving. Just real Linux internals explained clearly, visually, and practically.