IBM Developerworks: "The Linux kernel is what's known as a monolithic kernel, which means that the majority of the operating system functionality is called the kernel and runs in a privileged mode This differs from a micro-kernel, which runs only basic functionality as the kernel (inter-process communication [IPC], scheduling, basic input/output [I/O], memory management) and pushes other functionality outside the privileged space (drivers, network stack, file systems) You'd think that Linux is then a very static kernel, but in fact it's quite the opposite Linux can be dynamically altered at run time through the use of Linux kernel modules (LKMs)."