Hacker News Reader

Comment by School-Cotton | Hacker News Reader

FreeBSD combined with this book is great for learning about operating systems in general, regardless of whether you care about FreeBSD specifically. The book goes into a lot of detail about why certain design decisions were made, and how things are implemented in other operating systems.

If you're already studied some other OS in general, you might not need this book, but if you haven't, this is a great place to start.

View on HN

Thanks! Do you think it's useful to get this one even if you have used Linux almost exclusively? Will it make it easier for one to get into Kernel development?

Sure. But it's worth having a FreeBSD box (or VM) that you can use to tinker with the kernel.

Recompiling FreeBSD kernel source is super easy, by the way. It comes in /usr/src on your machine and all you need to do to reinstall one with your changes is "make buildkernel && make installkernel" . Actually understanding the sometimes decades-old source code, on the other hand, might be a little more difficult...

How'd you compare this with Linux Kernel Development by Robert Love and/or Bovet/Cesati, especially for someone who's a newbie (but curious to learn and work hard)?

Yes. I'd also get 'Modern Operating Systems' by Tannenbaum, which will explain lots of stuff that might be opaque/confusing if you're not already a kernel guy.

Personally I would say yes, as it shows not all UNIXes are alike.

I've worked a little on kernel. I think it would surely help to get into kernel development. Codebase is different, but they share similar architecture. If you understand one, it wont be hard to get started with other. From my experience I found BSD codebase easier to approach than Linux.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com