Best Advanced Linux Kernel Training?

hdxia writes "Can anybody recommend a good Linux kernel training course? I have had some Linux kernel hacking experience, but would like to further harden and improve my understanding of the kernel. I expect the course would be advanced. You may say that the best method would be to dig into the kernel myself, but I really want to have a chance to discuss and learn all aspects of the kernel with an experienced instructor."

Comments

Hire someone

[bscott]

Truly "advanced" courses are hard to come by, because of limited appeal and other factors. The further you go into something the more inevitable specialization becomes, so it's not just a matter of offering one course for the tenth-of-a-percent of the market who's even heard of the Linux Kernel, but in all likelihood offering half a dozen ranging from security to device drivers to assembler optimization and so on. (and I'm just guessing here, knowing next to nothing about the kernel myself)

My suggestion would be to find someone who's pretty savvy in the area you're aimed at, and hire him or her (OK, let's face it, "him"...) for some lessons. Keep in mind that a good programmer is not the same as a good teacher, but if you find someone who can explain things the way you need to hear them then you won't need that many lessons to make a lot of progress - the cost could very well end up in the same league as a commercially-vended course.

I'm just guessing that finding a kernel guru willing to give up a month of Saturday afternoons at $300 a session will be easier than finding "Linux Kernel for Experts" at the downtown Learning Annex.

Re:Hire someone

[bfields]

My suggestion would be to find someone who's pretty savvy in the area you're aimed at, and hire him or her (OK, let's face it, "him"...)

The gender ratio is pretty extreme, but it's not 100%--there *are* expert female kernel hackers.

I'm just guessing that finding a kernel guru willing to give up a month of Saturday afternoons at $300 a session will be easier than finding "Linux Kernel for Experts" at the downtown Learning Annex.

Personal tutoring is a pretty expensive way to get an education, especially if it's in a fast-moving field whose experts are in demand for other work.

Off the top of my head:

• Volunteer, and find a problem to work on.
• Find someone to hire you to do kernel work, or some other way to work with people doing what you want to do.
• Have you considered grad school? There's places where you could get a degree taking operating systems classes and hacking the kernel for your dissertation. And when you're done you'll probably have an easier time with the previous item.
• Local user groups and universities might be good places to meet up with people who share your interests. Maybe start a study group to learn some kernel subsystem together?
• Conferences: OLS and linux.conf.au are fun. The OLS papers at least are on line if you can't go.
• Mailing lists, irc channels--look at kernelnewbies, etc.
• Books: Linux Device Drivers, Understanding the Linux Kernel, Robert Love's book.
• Read the code!

And if people have told you that "the best method would be to dig into the kernel myself",... actually, in the end, it's probably the *only* way. There's a certain point in your study of any field where you just run out of "courses". That's good. It means you're ready to do real work, because you're at the point where people are still busy doing the work and figuring stuff out, and haven't yet figured out how to break it down into manageable chunks and explain it in a logical order, which is a great deal of work in and of itself.

Re:Hire someone

[azhrei_fje]

I've been teaching Linux Kernel Internals and Linux Device Driver courses (among others) since 1995 and other Un*x topics prior to that.

Many of the big names "outsource" their very technical training to third parties unless the topic is something related to an internal project (I won't name those companies here, but suffice to say that their names are abbreviations and usually three characters or less in length :)).

These training classes will cost the company $1k-$2k per student, depending on the exact nature of the course. This covers a 5-day class, 7-8 hours per day, with labs as practical for each topic. Obviously, in 5 days you're not going to get a lot of depth in any single topic, but a good instructor will be able to answer off-the-cuff questions during breaks between topics. I know that in a 10-15 minute break, I often get about 3 minutes to make a run to a restroom and spend the rest of the time going over details with one or more students. The most common areas of questions include processor scheduling (big changes in this area right now), virtual memory implementation details (especially the slab allocator and zoned memory concepts), and the block layer API. We don't get heavy into implementation details, but the student is expected to have at least some C background so that they can accomplish the lab exercises.

Some customers require detailed knowledge about specific subsystems and I will add a "chalk talk" ("dry erase talk"?) as time permits to cover those areas as much as possible. For example, a company that makes video poker machines running Linux might want details on hacking the interrupt handlers, while a company that builds disk storage units might want to talk about how best to support a custom RAID controller. Those types of things come up primarily in the Linux Device Driver course; the Internals course typically comes first in the curriculum and can be applied by application and system programmers to the code they write.

Most individuals are not going to be able to afford the associated costs, however. There are some training companies that offer "public" courses: I do those classes as well as on-site classes, but public classes for Internals don't often happen because there's not enough interest to fill the classroom with warm bodies. Send me a message if you're looking for such classes and I'll give you a list of vendors. If you opt to go the less expensive route, I suggest you get Robert Love's book on the Linux Kernel; overall it's a great book, but it does lack depth in one or two areas. After you understand what he covers there, then download the free book on the Linux VMM from

Sorry, I'm rambling. I'll now return you to your regularly scheduled pr0n viewing. :)