Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Understanding the Linux Kernel: The Linux Kernel Startup

internals-for-interns.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–25 of 25 posts

Re: Understanding the Linux Kernel: The Linux Kernel Startup

#21

Post by mirzap »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #14
gchamonlive wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That’s pretty much what the Linux kernel does at boot. The bootloader is the dropship. Your computer is the barren planet. The advance team is the execution of the startup code in the Linux kernel—the one we’ll be following the whole time. And by the end of this article, that advance team will literally have transformed itself into the standby maintenance crew while a brand-new civilian government takes over. Bear…

> Seems pretty good so far, ... I'm not sure about "good". These horrible analogies though scream AI-generated content. LinkedIn is full of such crap: AI apparently atm loves to sprinking short sentences of the form: "The X is the Y. The A is the B." or "It's not C. It's D" . when making analogies. Everything has to be a "pattern": things cannot be described on their own. There needs to be a connection to something e…

I’m more interested in the topic myself. Do you have any recommended reads (besides the usual ones - tldp, kernel docs, linux foundation, etc)?

Re: Understanding the Linux Kernel: The Linux Kernel Startup

#22

Post by valyala »

tcp_handshaker wrote: post #18
oncallthrow wrote: post #11

I came, I saw the em dash, I closed the tab

No no you are not looking at this correctly :-) This AI slop, on which I was able to quickly find four mistakes... Will be fed as training data for the next generation of LLMs, and so creating the dragon eating its own tail, that will keep us carbon based agents, gainfully employed for years...

> This AI slop, on which I was able to quickly find four mistakes

Could you provide more details about these mistakes?

Re: Understanding the Linux Kernel: The Linux Kernel Startup

#23

Post by valyala »

mirzap wrote: post #21
TacticalCoder wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Seems pretty good so far, ... I'm not sure about "good". These horrible analogies though scream AI-generated content. LinkedIn is full of such crap: AI apparently atm loves to sprinking short sentences of the form: "The X is the Y. The A is the B." or "It's not C. It's D" . when making analogies. Everything has to be a "pattern": things cannot be described on their own. There needs to be a connection to something e…

I’m more interested in the topic myself. Do you have any recommended reads (besides the usual ones - tldp, kernel docs, linux foundation, etc)?

https://lwn.net is a goldmine of great contents about Linux kernel.

Let me explain why I post links to posts from https://internals-for-interns.com . I hate AI slop. The author of these posts uses AI for generating these posts - this is clearly visible via AI-generated images, emojis and em dashes. But the posts themselves do not contain misleading slop you could see in a typical AI-generated content. These posts are very clear and accurate. While they contain some inaccuracies and mistakes, the number of these mistakes is very low. These posts help learning and understanding complex technical topics such as internals of Go, filesystems, databases and linux kernel, by reading a clear easy to understand text.

It is important to differentiate between low-quality AI slop and high-quality contents generated with the help of AI. The posts at https://internals-for-interns.com belong to the second category.

While at it, I recommend reading the article from ClickHouse author on how to properly use AI - https://clickhouse.com/blog/agentic-coding .

Re: Understanding the Linux Kernel: The Linux Kernel Startup

#24

Post by tcp_handshaker »

valyala wrote: post #22
tcp_handshaker wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No no you are not looking at this correctly :-) This AI slop, on which I was able to quickly find four mistakes... Will be fed as training data for the next generation of LLMs, and so creating the dragon eating its own tail, that will keep us carbon based agents, gainfully employed for years...

> This AI slop, on which I was able to quickly find four mistakes Could you provide more details about these mistakes?

https://docs.kernel.org/driver-api/early-userspace/early_use...

C. "...using initramfs. The call to prepare_namespace() must be skipped. This means that a binary must do all the work. Said binary can be stored into initramfs either via modifying usr/gen_init_cpio.c or via the new initrd format, an cpio archive. It must be called “/init”. This binary is responsible to do all the things prepare_namespace() would do..."

Re: Understanding the Linux Kernel: The Linux Kernel Startup

#25

Post by jespino »

tcp_handshaker wrote: post #24
valyala wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This AI slop, on which I was able to quickly find four mistakes Could you provide more details about these mistakes?

https://docs.kernel.org/driver-api/early-userspace/early_use... C. "...using initramfs. The call to prepare_namespace() must be skipped. This means that a binary must do all the work. Said binary can be stored into initramfs either via modifying usr/gen_init_cpio.c or via the new initrd format, an cpio archive. It must be called “/init”. This binary is responsible to do all the things prepare_namespace() would do..."

This is good feedback, I'll going to incorporate it to the article, to make it more clear about the two paths there. Thanks.
Post reply on HN