You said you were "new to the whole scene"; you will at least need basic kernel hacking to work on the networking subsystem; at least enough to be able to use t

You said you were "new to the whole scene"; you will at least need basic kernel hacking to work on the networking subsystem; at least enough to be able to use the appropariate memory allocation strategies; the options to kmalloc are not optional, you will have to grok what each strategy entails; same for slab buffers, synchronization primitives, error handling and clean up, etc. The book you REALLY want is ULNI; the driver model is essential for understanding the kernel because everything in the kernel is "pluggable", you almost use the same mechanisms to register a device driver, a file system, a network protocol, or something as basic as creating a new sysfs entry. If you're feeling too macho you can probably ignore Rubini and Love and just get ULNI and ctags ;-)