Re:

["Valdis Klētnieks" <valdis.kletnieks@vt.edu>]

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On Tue, 17 Mar 2020 04:37:58 +0530, Sankalp Bhardwaj said:

> Where to get started?? I am interested in understanding how the
> kernel works but have no prior knowledge... Please help!!

A good place to start is to realize that the answers often depend on what the
question is - and there's usually a difference between the question that is
asked, and the question that the person needs the answer for.  You probably
want to read this:

https://lists.kernelnewbies.org/pipermail/kernelnewbies/2017-April/017765.html

Something that you'll need is a good understanding of operating system
concepts. Almost all modern computer systems have some idea of basic concepts
such as processes, files, a directory structure, security and permissions,
scheduling, locking, and so on.  And for most of these, there is more than one
way to accomplish the goal.

So two books that are useful to read for a compare-and-contrast view are Bach's
book on the System V kernel, and McKusic's book on the BSD kernel - both go
into details of *why* some things are done they are.  It's really helpful to
see stuff like "We need to lock this inode while we do X, because otherwise
another thread could concurrently do Y, and then Bad Thing Z will happen".

Of course, a Linux filesystem that does things differently won't have the same
exact issues, but understanding the *sort* of things that break when you screw
up your locking is quite the useful info, especially if most of your coding has
been in userspace where single-threaded is common and libraries did their own
locking when needed.

I admit that I also learned a bunch from Tanenbaum's "Modern Operating
Systems", but that was a long long time ago in a galaxy far far away, and I
have no idea what the cool kids are reading instead these days...


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