Ask HN: Recommended resources to learn the Linux kernel and OS theory?

Re:Ask HN: Recommended resources to learn the Linux kernel a... by lorenzfx on Tuesday August 27, 2019 @10:50AM (#20810139)

If you are still interested in FreeBSD, "The Design and Implementation of the Freebsd Operating System" is a fantastic book. It's a great guide in how a UNIX system and especially FreeBSD works and written by some of FreeBSD's most respected developers.

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Re:Ask HN: Recommended resources to learn the Linux kernel a... by mjb on Tuesday August 27, 2019 @11:53AM (#20810990)

This is a great book, and while FreeBSD and Linux differ in a lot of ways, there are enough similarities to make it worth reading even if you're only interested in Linux.

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Re:Ask HN: Recommended resources to learn the Linux kernel a... by non-entity on Tuesday August 27, 2019 @10:52AM (#20810165)

I actually did get a copy of that! Unfortunately, I only have the ebook at the moment, which I find difficult to read

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Re:Ask HN: Recommended resources to learn the Linux kernel a... by ashafer on Tuesday August 27, 2019 @11:18AM (#20810488)

If you want something more hands on you can try "FreeBSD Device Drivers: A Guide for the Intrepid" by Joseph Kong. It is much easier to read, and my guess is you ran into it while making those BSD patches.

He also has a short book on building rootkits for BSD, which is a very fun read and demonstrates how things like system calls work.

If you want a guide to reading actual kernel code, here is a great resource explaining where some of the foundational pieces are. With a tool like cscope, reading the FreeBSD kernel is actually pretty easy.

http://www.watson.org/~robert/freebsd/reading/

Hope that helps!

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