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FreeBSD Device Drivers Book

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Re: FreeBSD Device Drivers Book

#41

Post by kernalix7 »

mghackerlady wrote: post #28
kernalix7 wrote: post #13

My exposure to FreeBSD has been mostly through routers and firewalls, plus reading about jails and finding the concept genuinely impressive. Always wanted to dig deeper but the existing material assumes you already know the things I was hoping to learn. A book that explicitly starts before that wall sounds like exactly what's been missing. Going to give it a real shot.

Have you poked through the handbook or Absolute FreeBSD? Those are both great starting points

Hadn't actually heard of either, thanks for the pointers. Will start with the Handbook.

Re: FreeBSD Device Drivers Book

#42

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

kernalix7 wrote: post #40
futune wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, boot environments are the killer feature. I think it's the only mainstream OS to really support the concept. Void linux (which is great) and (probably?) the Illumos distributions are the other open source choices, but those are much more niche. Or you could bolt it on to another linux distro using ZBM, but then you're on your own. Every update I clone the current boot environment, execute it as a jail, run up…

That's a really compelling workflow. On the Linux side I've heard of openSUSE's MicroOS doing something conceptually similar with BTRFS snapshots and atomic transactional updates, though I haven't actually run it. Different mechanism but it sounds like the same instinct. Never let the running system get into an inconsistent state during an upgrade. The "boot just once" plus jail-the-clone-to-upgrade combo you describ…

> On the Linux side I've heard of openSUSE's MicroOS doing something conceptually similar with BTRFS snapshots and atomic transactional updates, though I haven't actually run it. Different mechanism but it sounds like the same instinct.

I have run the Kalpa Desktop, which is basically MicroOS + KDE, and yes that's almost exactly the same setup; updates/changes are done using transactional-update, which AIUI performs the change in a new root snapshot/filesystem and then you reboot to make it take effect. Honestly a very nice system, although I eventually abandoned it because I was ultimately unwilling to run on BTRFS (which I absolutely do not trust).

Re: FreeBSD Device Drivers Book

#45

Post by icedchai »

LeCompteSftware wrote: post #10
rvz wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if it was, the author is not a random person and is part of the FreeBSD team and I'd rather trust them to write the book than someone else outside of the organization. So I would expect that they would thoroughly check the book for inaccuracies, errors and issues before releasing it after proof-reading, otherwise it would say a lot about how they use LLMs and not checking over it would hurt their own reputation.

I guarantee they didn't read a single word of this book. Look at the introduction to C and tell me that a) it's a good introduction to C b) a human read any of it https://github.com/ebrandi/FDD-book/blob/main/content/chapte... This book is a dishonest AI scam.

Yep. It's not the best intro to C, for sure. I learned C when I was a teenager, from K&R C second edition, and several Amiga-specific books ("Amiga C for Beginners", for one.)

Re: FreeBSD Device Drivers Book

#46

Post by icedchai »

treadmill wrote: post #24
LeCompteSftware wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is something wrong with it because LLMs are really not capable of writing a useful book, and this book is 100% LLM slop. Look at this totally useless """introduction""" to C: https://github.com/ebrandi/FDD-book/blob/main/content/chapte... First of all this is an entire book, it's 76,000 words. But look at the first nontrivial example of C after "hello world," under "Bonus learning point about C return values" e…

I am unsure which part of the quoted content you disagree with .

The jump in complexity from "example 1" to "example 2" is quite high, introducing unexplained concepts (like pointers...) It is unsuitable for one learning the language.

Re: FreeBSD Device Drivers Book

#47

Post by unmole »

futune wrote: post #20
kernalix7 wrote: post #13

My exposure to FreeBSD has been mostly through routers and firewalls, plus reading about jails and finding the concept genuinely impressive. Always wanted to dig deeper but the existing material assumes you already know the things I was hoping to learn. A book that explicitly starts before that wall sounds like exactly what's been missing. Going to give it a real shot.

For me, boot environments are the killer feature. I think it's the only mainstream OS to really support the concept. Void linux (which is great) and (probably?) the Illumos distributions are the other open source choices, but those are much more niche. Or you could bolt it on to another linux distro using ZBM, but then you're on your own. Every update I clone the current boot environment, execute it as a jail, run up…

openSUSE with snapper does this automatically. It's far more mainstream than FreeBSD.
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