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Breaking Into The World Of Kernel Hacking?

Posted by Cliff on from the learning-the-innards-of-a-penguin dept.

crow_t_robot asks: "In the past couple of months I have become increasingly interested in kernel programming and have finally decided to take the leap and 'get my hands dirty.' I have searched around the web and read a few docs and FAQs on getting started with the kernel but I was wondering what kind of personal experiences those in the Slashdot crowd have had that are so bold as to start goofing with the kernel code. For those that have become competent kernel programmers, how did you 'break in' and what advice would you give beginners?"

2 of 202 comments (clear)

  1. Take it straight from the man... Just Do It by FauxPasIII · · Score: 5, Insightful

    From Alan Cox's interview posted to slashdot a couple days ago:

    "Ignore everyone who tells you kernel hacking is hard, special or different. It's a large program, and bug fixing or driver tweaking can be a best starting point. It is however not magic, nor written in a secret language that only deep initiates with beards can read.

    Play with it, try things, break it horribly and enjoy yourself. I started on the networking code because it didn't work very well. Everything I knew about TCP/IP I had downloaded the same day I started hacking the net code. My first attempts were not pretty but it was *fun*."

    --
    25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
    1. Re:Take it straight from the man... Just Do It by Jeremy+Erwin · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Hacking the kernel can seem like a daunting task, but nothing focuses the imagination like broken hardware.

      Two cases in point: (the first one isn't a linux story). Someone gave me a joystick for a macintosh. I already possessed a flight simulator for the machine, but much to my chagrin, the joystick didn't have the right drivers. So, I spent the next few weeks writing a device driver (modifying Apple produced code, mostly.)

      Second: I owned a DVD drive with broken firmware-- the capacity wasn't reported correctly, and so oms would stop in the middle of the movie. With the (very) extensive help of "Andrew Ebling" (of kernelhacking.org, I was able to solve my problems.

      Moral of the story: it helps to have good developer documentation, and example code (provided, for the most part, by the kernel source itself) It also helps to have a reason to code.