Slashdot: Linux Core Kernel Commentary [Book Review]

“How would you dip your feet in the water, learning enough
to start dabbling with kernel development? Scott Maxwell might
end up as the guide for a fresh batch of aspiring programmers, with
his Linux Core Kernel Commentary. Starting with a lesson on the
history and philosophy behind free software, you can learn enough
to start contributing on your own.”

“The massive tome has nearly 40,000 lines of code from the
x86/arch branches of the Linux kernel. That works out to two
columns on each of over 400 pages. It’s mostly free of annotations,
except for small arrows referring to the commentary on that
section. The commentary takes up the rest, at three columns per
page. The architecture dependent functions target x86 code, and the
core features (memory management, processes, scheduling, signals
and threads, procfs) are covered.”

“Most interesting for me was the “a-ha!” factor. The normal
chapter flow describes the subsection in general terms (memory
management is designed to do such and such, with these issues),
moves to the important data structure, and then walks through the
vital functions for that section, stopping here and there to
explain peculiarities and subtleties of the code. There’s rough
going in a few spots, but there are occasional moments of insight
where the solutions come in to clear focus.”

Complete
Story