Civil Rights
Movements, leaders, victories and the continuing fight for equality.
Explore the people, places, events, achievements, struggles and stories that shaped our journey.
Movements, leaders, victories and the continuing fight for equality.
Innovation, patents, science, technology and world-changing contributions.
Pioneers, champions, Negro Leagues, records, activism and excellence.
Meet the people whose lives, choices and achievements shaped the journey.
Black towns, communities, institutions and places where history happened.
Moments that changed communities, movements, institutions and the nation.
Wilmington, North Carolina once had a thriving Black middle class and an elected interracial government. In 1898 white supremacists used violence to overthrow that government, kill Black residents and drive many others from the city.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
In Linux systems, initrd (initial ramdisk) is a scheme for loading a temporary root file system into memory, to be used as part of the Linux startup process. initrd and initramfs (from initial RAM file system) refer to two different methods of achieving this. Both are commonly used to make preparations before the real root file system can be mounted.
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. The development of klibc library was part of the 2002 effort to move some Linux initialization code out of the kernel. According to its documentation, the klibc library is optimized for correctness and small size. Because of its design, klibc is also technically suitable for embedded software in general on a variety of platforms, and is used even by full-featured programs such as the MirBSD Korn Shell. During the Linux startup process, klibc is loaded from within a temporary RAM file system, initramfs. It is incorporated by default into initial RAM file systems that are created by the mkinitramfs script in Debian and Ubuntu. Furthermore, it has a set of small Unix utilities that are useful in early user space: cpio, dash, fstype, mkdir, mknod, mount, nfsmount, run-init, etc. all using the klibc library. An alternate strategy is to include everything in one executable, like BusyBox, which determines the requested applet via arguments or hard links or symlinks.
The Linux booting process involves multiple stages and is in many ways similar to the BSD and other Unix-style boot processes, from which it is derived. Although the Linux booting process depends very much on the computer architecture, those architectures share similar stages and software components, including system startup, bootloader execution, loading and startup of a Linux kernel image, and execution of various startup scripts and daemons. Those are grouped into 4 steps: system startup, bootloader stage, kernel stage, and init process. When a Linux system is powered up or reset, its processor will execute a specific firmware/program for system initialization, such as the power-on self-test, invoking the reset vector to start a program at a known address in flash/ROM (in embedded Linux devices), then load the bootloader into RAM for later execution. In IBM PC–compatible personal computers (PCs), this firmware/program is either a BIOS or a UEFI monitor, and is stored in the mainboard. In embedded Linux systems, this firmware/program is called boot ROM. After being loaded into RAM, the bootloader (also called first-stage bootloader or primary bootloader) will execute to load the second-stage bootloader (also called secondary bootloader). The second-stage bootloader will load the kernel image into memory, decompress and initialize it, and then pass control to this kernel image. The second-stage bootloader also performs several operations on the system such as system hardware check, mounting the root device, loading the necessary kernel modules, etc. Finally, the first user-space process (init process) starts, and other high-level system initializations are performed (which involve with startup scripts). For each of these stages and components, there are different variations and approaches; for example, GRUB, systemd-boot, coreboot or Das U-Boot can be used as bootloaders (historical examples are LILO, SYSLINUX or Loadlin), while the startup scripts can be either traditional init-style, or the system configuration can be performed through modern alternatives such as systemd or runit.
In Unix-like computer operating systems, init (short for initialization) is the first user-space process started during booting of the operating system. Init is a daemon process that continues running until the system is shut down. It is the direct or indirect ancestor of all other processes and automatically adopts all orphaned processes. Init is started by the kernel during the booting process; in most Unix-like systems, a kernel panic will occur if the kernel is unable to start it or if it dies for any reason. Init is typically assigned process identifier 1. In Unix systems such as System III and System V, the design of init diverged from the functionality provided by the init in Research Unix and its BSD derivatives. Up until the early 2010s, most Linux distributions employed a traditional init that was somewhat compatible with System V, while some distributions such as Slackware use BSD-style startup scripts, and other distributions such as Gentoo have their own customized versions. Since then, most Linux distributions have employed a more modern init system, with most employing the init provided by the systemd project. Some distributions have elected to create their own System V-init compatible system, such as Gentoo Linux's OpenRC and Void Linux's runit. These projects typically include features originally not in System V's init, such as multi-threading or interactive init. Most modern init systems are also able to dynamically start, stop and enable services after boot with prompting by the user.
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
MORE →Madam C.J. Walker