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I seem to recall that getting started in BSD kernels looked easier, at least 10-12 years ago. More organized, plenty of literature, and (Theo notwithstanding) a

• girvo 13y ago
  Personally the first kernel I fiddled with was Haiku's, followed by BSD. The latter especially was far easier to understand (especially the old versions) than linux is today, IMO. Not that that's a bad thing per se, as linux is incredibly functional, but when I was getting into os development, having something to read through that I could grok easily was more important. I'm currently hacking on RetroBSD, which as it's based on BSD 2.1, is quite nice! Runs on my new Fubarino board too, at least in theory. I haven't quite got it booting yet ;)
• Niten 13y ago
  I agree... even more recently, about a year ago I ran into a minor glitch in the OpenBSD kernel while porting an application. The kernel was so simply and sensibly laid out that I was able to quickly identify and submit a patch for the problem, even though I'd never looked at the OpenBSD kernel prior to that. (Meanwhile I'm still trying to wrap my head around Linux...)
• bcantrill 13y ago
  And better tooling. I'm unspeakably biased here, but I can't imagine doing kernel development without DTrace. (Actually, that's not true, because I did kernel development for many years without DTrace; it sucked.) So I would start with the BSDs or one of the illumos variants (e.g., OmniOS or SmartOS), and ask about small yet interesting open problems -- of which there are plenty...