[Gllug] A Book for Bedtime

[Nix]

On Fri, 19 Nov 2004, David at aliada.plus.com stipulated:
> Thanks,
> this is exactly what I was seeking. It deals with a fundamental component of 
> the system with great clarity. Is there something similar that deals with how 
> the kernel works? 

Not really. The governing standard for the interface to portable
userspace is POSIX.1, which is available online. I have it open next to
my copy of _Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment_ whenever I'm
doing any C or C++ stuff in userspace that's meant to be portable:
<http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/nfindex.html>.

But that's not describing the *kernel*; it's really describing the
interface that the GNU C library shows to userspace. The interface
between the kernel and the rest of the world is arbitrary (although in
practice close to POSIX) because glibc can abstract away many
differences. There are some books, all more or less perpetually
outdated, on the Linux kernel in particular, and other books on other
Unix kernels.

But there's nothing that I know of that describes the organization of
the kernel source.

This isn't actually that much of a problem: except in places like the
memory balancing algorithms and the guts of the network stack and
hardware-specific tweakery, the Linux kernel isn't actually all that
hard to understand by reading the source. That's one of the reasons it's
been so successful: it pretty much is possible for anyone to just pitch
in and help out with only a little effort.

-- 
`The sword we forged has turned upon us
 Only now, at the end of all things do we see
 The lamp-bearer dies; only the lamp burns on.'
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