Ask YC: Any good online resources on the Linux kernel? | Hacker News Reader

Ask YC: Any good online resources on the Linux kernel?

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I've recently made the transition from the Windows world to full-time Linux usage and am finding myself increasingly curious as to how it all works. Are there any good primers on Linux kernel design or historical accounts of how the OS came together? I'm primarily looking for things that are available in digital format, as at the moment I'm not able to acquire additional paper products.

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Kernel Newbies (http://kernelnewbies.org/) has a lot of information on kernel hacking. There's a list of recommended books on kernel internals:

http://kernelnewbies.org/KernelBooks

Including an online book on writing Linux device drivers:

http://lwn.net/Kernel/LDD3/

And on the Linux virtual memory subsystem:

http://www.phptr.com/content/images/0131453483/downloads/gor...

Worse is Better is a good discussion of the philosophy of Unix, which definitely plays into the development of Linux.

http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html

The best beginning to end book is probably Understanding the Linux Kernel, 3rd edition (you can buy it online at . It covers a lot of operating system concepts and how they are implemented in the kernel. At some point you'll want to look at the source code, and the best way to do this is using the Linux Cross Reference, found at http://lxr.linux.no/ .

For the OS, there's http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/

For the kernel, Wikipedia seems to have a good introduction and external links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel

Browsed through the wiki article, but it is difficult to find (anywhere?) structured comparisons of OS design philosophies.

If you want a good discussion on OS design, get Andrew Tanenbaum's book "Operating Systems: Design and Implementation". He's the MINIX guy, and that book is pretty much the de facto standard text on operating systems. It's expensive, so see if you can find an international edition. I picked mine up for the equivalent of USD $10 in India.

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