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This does not make any sense. Any modern kernel(including the ones you mentioned) is going to be complex. The only way to get started is to dig in. Even if you

This does not make any sense. Any modern kernel(including the ones you mentioned) is going to be complex. The only way to get started is to dig in. Even if you do not make changes right away, trying to understand the code is a reward in itself. I also don't get your point about conflict of interest. There is no one corporate sponsor of Linux. And just because you are a newbie, your patch is not looked down upon. There is a great community willing to help if you put in the effort.

davidw 11y ago
A while back I did some fooling around with eCos, and wanted to add a floppy driver. I looked at the Linux one, some from BSD, but settled on the Minix code: it was a lot simpler and easier to understand. I'm sure it was less efficient, and handled far fewer weird corner cases, but it was just a matter of a day or two of hacking to port it to eCos. It really depends on your goals - if you just want to learn, then Minix is pretty good.
- pmelendez 11y ago
  Minix 3 is quite efficient. I would suspect that the complexity comes from the design choices of each OS. Monolithic kernels tend to be more complicated to be maintained than microkernel OSs.
shmerl 11y ago
Yeah, illumos doesn't sound like a simple example.
- bcantrill 11y ago
  illumos actually has the advantage of a rich set of tooling designed for kernel development (DTrace, mdb, etc.) as well as an ethos of detailed comments -- and it tends to be a bit of a self-selecting community in that it attracts people who value the same. As an example of the adventures of a relative newcomer to illumos, see the excellent writings of Ryan Zezeski, e.g. [1][2][3]. [1] http://zinascii.com/2015/illumos-5498.html http://zinascii.com/2015/illumos-5498.html [2] http://zinascii.com/2014/crossed-signals.html http://zinascii.com/2014/crossed-signals.html [3] http://zinascii.com/2014/a-posix-queue-implementation.html http://zinascii.com/2014/a-posix-queue-implementation.html
  - shmerl 11y ago
    Thanks!

davidw 11y ago

A while back I did some fooling around with eCos, and wanted to add a floppy driver. I looked at the Linux one, some from BSD, but settled on the Minix code: it was a lot simpler and easier to understand. I'm sure it was less efficient, and handled far fewer weird corner cases, but it was just a matter of a day or two of hacking to port it to eCos. It really depends on your goals - if you just want to learn, then Minix is pretty good.

pmelendez 11y ago
Minix 3 is quite efficient. I would suspect that the complexity comes from the design choices of each OS. Monolithic kernels tend to be more complicated to be maintained than microkernel OSs.

shmerl 11y ago

Yeah, illumos doesn't sound like a simple example.

bcantrill 11y ago
illumos actually has the advantage of a rich set of tooling designed for kernel development (DTrace, mdb, etc.) as well as an ethos of detailed comments -- and it tends to be a bit of a self-selecting community in that it attracts people who value the same. As an example of the adventures of a relative newcomer to illumos, see the excellent writings of Ryan Zezeski, e.g. [1][2][3]. [1] http://zinascii.com/2015/illumos-5498.html http://zinascii.com/2015/illumos-5498.html [2] http://zinascii.com/2014/crossed-signals.html http://zinascii.com/2014/crossed-signals.html [3] http://zinascii.com/2014/a-posix-queue-implementation.html http://zinascii.com/2014/a-posix-queue-implementation.html
- shmerl 11y ago
  Thanks!