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NetBSD Code Study
- silasdb 6y agoAuthor here. Thanks for posting this. This is something I wanted to continue. The plan is still discussing NetBSD source code, as much as I can. Reading NetBSD code is a great way to learn operating systems! :-)
- jayp1418 6y agoThanks for article .. looking forward to seeing more code reading.
- non-entity 6y agoImo NetBSD source code is much cleaner than some of the equivalent FreeBSD code. I just wish the NetBSD documentation was on par.
- manuw 6y agoI like the idea. Few years ago there was an similar thing but with OpenBSD code. There is a IRC channel on Freenode who a group of people go through OpenBSD code like "doas" and stuff. I follow your future articles :)
- gnanesh 6y agoCan you share the link for OpenBSD?
- mulander 6y agoHi, I'm the guy who did the OpenBSD code reads. The daily started in June 2017 we kept up doing it daily for 42 days straight. In total there were 47 code reads. http://blog.tintagel.pl/2017/06/09/openbsd-daily.html http://blog.tintagel.pl/2017/06/09/openbsd-daily.html http://blog.tintagel.pl/2017/09/10/openbsd-daily-recap.html http://blog.tintagel.pl/2017/09/10/openbsd-daily-recap.html
- gnanesh 6y agoThank you.
- pwdisswordfish2 6y agoI always found it noteworthy in that the designers of Microsoft Windows did not consider co-existance with other OS on the same computer, i.e., "dual-booting". When I install NetBSD I never have to worry about it clobbering any code needed by other OS to boot. Not sure about today, but years ago Windows used to require being installed in the first bootable partition. If some other OS code occupied that position it was clobbered. On the other hand, the designers of NetBSD seem to have considered the possible co-existence with other OS on the same computer. To me, that is great design. NetBSD has this author's favorite bootloaders and I consider their kernels more flexible to boot than Linux kernels. I do not use grub. NetBSD has long supported the 1995 multiboot specification. Years ago, Linux did not. Perhaps that has changed. It always seemed like there were only a limited number of bootloaders that could boot Linux.
- psexec 6y ago>designers of Microsoft Windows did not consider co-existance with other OS on the same computer Why would they? According to Microsoft and many third-party developers who don't know any better, PC and Windows are the same thing. It's way less painful these days if you're using UEFI. No thanks to MS though.
- pwdisswordfish2 6y agoFrom what I have read I suspect this may have been an intentionally created incompatibility. They wanted dual boot to be inconvenient. As a user, that is not the sort of design I want.
- pjmlp 6y agoDual boot has always been relatively easy among PC OS via Boot.ini, in what concerns Windows and OS/2, the OSes originally thought for PCs. It is not as Apple, Atari or Commodore provided dual boot alternatives as well, and Boot Camp was more a result from survival than anything else.
- 6y ago
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y agoOh, this is very nice:) One question: Why does this page open with a link to FreeBSD docs? (Just general information on x86 boot process? Is this code similar/shared between the BSD family members?)
- silasdb 6y agoYes, this is just general information on x86 boot process, but it shares some things with NetBSD boot process, specially how the boot is divided in phases. When I first started this doc, it was just personal writing, because of that some links are scattered and there are TODO entries laying around. I'll fix that one day :-)
- GeertVL 6y agoWell done. It gives me inspiration to go through other codebases (Rust compiler, Go compiler, .NET Roslyn, ...)