Re: Linux kernel development for a beginner

First of all, my apologies for the late reply. I've been a bit busy with it being the Christmas season and all. This is also, BTW, my first post with a real newsreader (Thunderbird.. I'd appreciate it if someone has a different favorite they'd like to suggest) instead of Google Groups Beta =)

BearItAll wrote:
[..]
> Your 512 bytes is a boot loader, it loads the first part of your own code,

A bit like this,

Bios boots, finds bootable primary, loads the 512 bytes and jumps to the
first instruction.
Lets us say that you have the start of your actual loader code at 513 and
your version of MyGrub is 2k of code.
Then all your 512 needs to do is load from offset 513 to 513+2048 into
memory and jump to it. Jump to data! I here you ask. Well that is one of
those things you have yet to learn.

That makes sense. So is that all in assembly language then? Also, would it still be a wise choice to study BIOS since it's being replaced with EFI?

BearItAll wrote:
Joshua, it is good that you have an interest in this area but there is only
so far I could take you in a news group. So instead I am going to point you
where you should go, in the order that you should do it.

That's what I was hoping for. Thank you =)

BearItAll wrote:
Look at 'Art of assembly', don't worry if you don't understand the code, I
want you to understand more that the bios gives a fairly high level of
access to at least the primary hardware of your machine.

I read some information about it. It looks quite interesting, though I'm not sure whether I'm going to finish studying the boot loader itself (like I said above, I'm not sure it'd be wise to study BIOS at this point in time).

BearItAll wrote:
> [..]
As an extra, more for general interest at this stage,
http://kernelbook.sourceforge.net , also join the actual kernel developers
on sourceforge, introduce yourself and tell them that you are studying and
only able to be an observer at the moment. They may not have the time to
help you study, other than give you better pointers maybe, but it is always
nice on sourceforge when people turn up showing an interest in what your
team is doing.

Is that the http://user-mode-linux.sourceforge.net/new/index.html page? I'm not 100% certain since it says "user mode".

BearItAll wrote:
Best of luck with it, and trust your own abilities, how ever daunting your
task looks now, it will not belong before the mountain is mole hill sized.

Thanks for all your help. I appreciate it. I have one more question: What's the best Usenet section to post more questions on the subject of kernel development? Most of them seem to have been dead for a year or two.


Jeroen Geilman wrote:
> Because it *wants* you to.
>
> There are many modern drivers that don't *require* this per se -
> nvidia's driver set is a good example; many NICs don't require you to
> reboot either.
> The bitch is in the pudding, though: Windows drivers tend to be very
> tightly linked to the kernel - more tightly than a Linux developer
> would consider sane.
> For many drivers, the load order is not just significant, but crucial
> so you'd have to unload everything that has to be loaded after the new
> driver, which is often simply not practical.
>
> There are also many drivers that provide some sort of GUI interface to
> their services, which have to be loaded on startup as well - and the
> sodding *** will refuse to load it when it's first installed.
>
> Not because it technically has to be loaded on startup; no, simply
> because _the programmer wants you to_.
>
>
> J.

I figured as much (this is proprietary software we're talking about, after all.) Do you think this is an issue of laziness or some other nonsense, like DRM?

- Josh Williams
.