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> I'd recommend maybe not working on Linux if you are trying to learn kernel development and OS internals. Could you also tell why ?

by xz0r 7y ago

waddlesplash 7y ago
The Linux kernel is really, really large, and changes extremely rapidly, to the point of breaking such "experiments" (as the original poster already noted.) It's also rather loosely commented and, aside from a handful of core systems, not so well documented. The BSDs do much better here; they have excellent manpages for almost all kernel APIs, manuals for how the internals work, and very good source code commenting and organization practices. Haiku is not as good as the BSDs on manpages and manuals, but that's the only real way we differ from them (in this respect.)
kjs3 7y ago
Complexity. Start with something where you can substantially wrap your head around the whole thing, like XV6 or Minix, and it's vastly easier to look at chucks of something like Linux and see "oh, this fits into the mental picture here". For me, in the mists of the old days, learning Unix V6 out of the Lyons books (very slim volumes of annotation...wonderful stuff) make it easy to understand what was going on in V7, which made 4.2BSD and progeny accessible, which made SVR[234] somewhat weird and different, but still conceptually understandable, which made most everything Unix-ish afterword (including Linux) something you still had the vernacular to understand. Now...to be fair...this leaves out a lot of really valuable OS knowledge. There's no IBM large system OS (e.g VM/370->z/OS, VM/CMS, TPF). No Seven Dwarfs OS (DEC VMS, Burroughs B-series, DG Nova, CDC NOS, etc.). Nothing for the really interesting Lisp or Smalltalk machines, the Perq or the Mesa/Cedar workstations. No interesting small systems OS: OS/2, classic MacOS, OS-9, much less the Windows NT family. Much less any of the embedded/RTOS world. But you can still learn alot.

> I'd recommend maybe not working on Linux if you are trying to learn kernel development and OS internals. Could you also tell why ?

by xz0r 7y ago

> I'd recommend maybe not working on Linux if you are trying to learn kernel development and OS internals. Could you also tell why ?

waddlesplash 7y ago

The Linux kernel is really, really large, and changes extremely rapidly, to the point of breaking such "experiments" (as the original poster already noted.) It's also rather loosely commented and, aside from a handful of core systems, not so well documented. The BSDs do much better here; they have excellent manpages for almost all kernel APIs, manuals for how the internals work, and very good source code commenting and organization practices. Haiku is not as good as the BSDs on manpages and manuals, but that's the only real way we differ from them (in this respect.)

kjs3 7y ago

Complexity. Start with something where you can substantially wrap your head around the whole thing, like XV6 or Minix, and it's vastly easier to look at chucks of something like Linux and see "oh, this fits into the mental picture here". For me, in the mists of the old days, learning Unix V6 out of the Lyons books (very slim volumes of annotation...wonderful stuff) make it easy to understand what was going on in V7, which made 4.2BSD and progeny accessible, which made SVR[234] somewhat weird and different, but still conceptually understandable, which made most everything Unix-ish afterword (including Linux) something you still had the vernacular to understand. Now...to be fair...this leaves out a lot of really valuable OS knowledge. There's no IBM large system OS (e.g VM/370->z/OS, VM/CMS, TPF). No Seven Dwarfs OS (DEC VMS, Burroughs B-series, DG Nova, CDC NOS, etc.). Nothing for the really interesting Lisp or Smalltalk machines, the Perq or the Mesa/Cedar workstations. No interesting small systems OS: OS/2, classic MacOS, OS-9, much less the Windows NT family. Much less any of the embedded/RTOS world. But you can still learn alot.