Hello André, On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 7:41 PM, André Silva <andre.beat@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Hi, > > I'm taking a masters degree in computer engineering and I'm really > interested in OSs, so the idea of hacking the linux kernel really got to my > curiosity. While I was looking for the best way to start I found this > project which seemed a really good way for me to get into the kernel. The > thing is the idea I got from the project's website and irc channel is that > project is kind of dead. I want to know if that is the case or if there is > anyone out there willing to help me out. Yes, there is always people in the community willing to help > I have a fair knowledge of C programming and UNIX programming, my knowledge > of assembly and cpu architectures is a bit poor though. > The Linux kernel is highly portable. Every subsystem (process scheduling, memory management, I/O, storage) has a architecture dependant part and a platform independent part. So you don't need to be a assembly/hardware guru to be a Linux kernel developer as long as you stay in the platform independent part of the code. > Also, if anyone could recommend the "best" way to get my feet wet (books to > read, documentation to read, tasks to start hacking), any help would be > appreciated. > I dont know if it is the "best" way but I think that a good one is first reading about the Linux kernel internals. The best book in my opinion is Linux kernel development by Robert Love. Others very good books are Linux Device Drivers and Essential Linux Device Drivers. Then you could make a few very basic modules to get familiar with the data structures from your relevant area (i.e: task_struct for scheduling or sk_buff for networking). Once you learn the data structures and the API you could use Linux as a platform to develop anything that you want. Then you should investigate what it is the state of the art in the area that interest you, read some papers, talk with your professors to find a algorithm that you could implement in Linux. > Since the kernel is such a big monster I might add that one of my main > interest areas is scheduling. > The first time i hack in the Linux kernel was when I was a student. We had an assignment in a operating system course and it was rewriting a major part in the Linux kernel. My teammate and I choose scheduling. So we implement a really silly fair share scheduler, basically what we did was schedule in round robin by group, user and thread. The implementation didn't support neither SMP nor kernel preemption, it was inefficient and buggy, but we learned a lot and served as academic purpose. The scheduler wasn't more that 50 lines long but the really hard part was figure out what we need to do. We found in Robert Love's Linux Kernel Development book all the information we need to learn how the Linux scheduler works and what were the relevant data structures and functions (i.e: struct task_struct, context_switch). > I'm sorry if my English isn't perfect but as it is not my main language > there might be some screw ups. > > Regards, > André Silva > -- > To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe kernel-janitors" in > the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html > Hope it helps Best regards ----------------------------------------- Javier Martínez Canillas +595 981 88 66 58 -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe kernel-janitors" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
