Linux-insides: The initcall mechanism

An idea I have is to have a similar series for basic device driver structure and making smaller changes in those places to fix minor annoyances and understand better the OS-machine interaction. Does anyone know of a similar (existing) resource (LDD apart, I guess that book is pretty outdated now.)?

[1] Linux Device Drivers - the O'Reilly book by gregkh and Jim Corbet.

Here is a typical trace showing initcall timings. It's helpful to download it and use `less -r' to view so you can see the ANSI colours:

http://oirase.annexia.org/tmp/min-seabios.txt

One thing that struck my attention is how little comments there are in Linux at times. Consider this:

https://github.com/0xAX/linux-insides/blob/master/Initializa... https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/097f70b3c4d84ffccca15...

Not a single line of commentary for something that definitely is not a trivial instruction.

I'm getting the impression that this kind of documentation should be built directly into Linux's source code, creating a document that is self-documenting and both human- and machine-readable.

On a separate note, it would be really nice if Gitlab supported something like ctags for browser-based code navigation...

"The Bourne shell can be used instead of init..."

An easy way to avoid systemd if the user is more comfortable with using a BSD-style /etc/rc approach to starting services?