I’ve been reading Linux Kernel Development by Robert Love recently, and it’s exactly the book I’ve always been looking for. A number of kernel books have spent a long time in my wait queue gathering dust and becoming obsolete with every passing day. I’ve gazed longingly at the venerable Lion’s Book on many many occasions only to push it back in the queue because I felt I needed to finish another book first before I could move on to it.
I put an end to all the procrastination and dived into RML’s book and it was glorious. Seriously folks, five stars. It dives straight into the key aspects of the kernel with code commentary and examples. It doesn’t attempt to present all the details of the various interfaces and subsystems that it covers and leaves that as an excercise to the reader. Armed with something like LXR, this has never been easier.
Also, for those aspiring to mess around with the internals while at it, do check out UML (User Mode Linux) which is already in mainline 2.6 and excellent for creating sandboxes to play with.
I’m in a similar situation as far as books go. I’ve ran out of bookmarks trying to start reading a book and then getting caught up with other things and then starting to read another book.
I too have RML’s book but hasn’t yet gone beyond the first inspirational chapter. It seems like a gr8 book and RML seems to want to advocate kernel development among many as opposed to keeping it among a few die hard kernel hackers.
Oh yeah, love the way RML handles the subject.