Re: understanding the kernel
On Sun, Oct 29, 2006 at 11:18:28PM -0700, George Mihai IACOB wrote: Jonathan Gray wrote: On Sun, Oct 29, 2006 at 08:24:16PM -0700, George Mihai IACOB wrote: Hello! I am a not-so-experienced programmer and I started a personal project which requires a deep understanding of the OpenBSD kernel - no, I am not going to fork another BSD style operating system. I wonder if there is documentation describing the kernel, other that the comments in the source. For a start, I am reading Andrew Tanenbaum's Modern Operating Systems, 2nd edition and trying to follow the code in the kernel source, starting with sys/kern/init_main.c Is this a wrong approach? Do you have other suggestions? I know there's no easy way and I am not looking for one, all I want is a starting point. Regards, George You don't mention what you had in mind so it is hard to point at anything. The Design and Implementation of the 4.4 BSD Operating System by McKusick and friends is likely to be more relevant for implementation details, Tanebaum's book is more high level theory. Well, I want to be able to write software which should run in kernel mode and/or modify the kernel. Basically, I'm just like a college student taking an operating systems course and using OpenBSD as an example. Operating System Concepts by Silbershatz, Galvin and Gagne: http://codex.cs.yale.edu/avi/os-book/os7/ As a bonus, there are pretty dinosaur pictures at the start of each chapter. Also, get the BSD book mentioned above. -Damian
understanding the kernel
Hello! I am a not-so-experienced programmer and I started a personal project which requires a deep understanding of the OpenBSD kernel - no, I am not going to fork another BSD style operating system. I wonder if there is documentation describing the kernel, other that the comments in the source. For a start, I am reading Andrew Tanenbaum's Modern Operating Systems, 2nd edition and trying to follow the code in the kernel source, starting with sys/kern/init_main.c Is this a wrong approach? Do you have other suggestions? I know there's no easy way and I am not looking for one, all I want is a starting point. Regards, George
Re: understanding the kernel
On Sun, Oct 29, 2006 at 08:24:16PM -0700, George Mihai IACOB wrote: Hello! I am a not-so-experienced programmer and I started a personal project which requires a deep understanding of the OpenBSD kernel - no, I am not going to fork another BSD style operating system. I wonder if there is documentation describing the kernel, other that the comments in the source. For a start, I am reading Andrew Tanenbaum's Modern Operating Systems, 2nd edition and trying to follow the code in the kernel source, starting with sys/kern/init_main.c Is this a wrong approach? Do you have other suggestions? I know there's no easy way and I am not looking for one, all I want is a starting point. Regards, George You don't mention what you had in mind so it is hard to point at anything. The Design and Implementation of the 4.4 BSD Operating System by McKusick and friends is likely to be more relevant for implementation details, Tanebaum's book is more high level theory.
Re: understanding the kernel
On Sun, 29 Oct 2006, George Mihai IACOB wrote: Hello! I am a not-so-experienced programmer and I started a personal project which requires a deep understanding of the OpenBSD kernel - no, I am not going to fork another BSD style operating system. I wonder if there is documentation describing the kernel, other that the comments in the source. For a start, I am reading Andrew Tanenbaum's Modern Operating Systems, 2nd edition and trying to follow the code in the kernel source, starting with sys/kern/init_main.c Is this a wrong approach? Do you have other suggestions? I know there's no easy way and I am not looking for one, all I want is a starting point. Regards, George A lot of internal kernel APIs are documented in section 9 of the man pages. And, while this may be superfluous, the public API, also known as system calls are described in section 2. -Otto
