Easylkb: Easy Linux Kernel Builder
tmpout.sh
Easylkb: Easy Linux Kernel Builder
1–10 of 29 posts
Re: Easylkb: Easy Linux Kernel Builder
#2I've wanted to do some Linux kernel development for a while now, but I've never mustered the will to go through the process.
This script may just be what I needed to start.
Re: Easylkb: Easy Linux Kernel Builder
#3I found the NixOS wiki[1] to have a fairly decent guide on how to hack on a kernel. The process there isn't nearly as concise as it is here though :)
Re: Easylkb: Easy Linux Kernel Builder
#4I've wanted to do some Linux kernel development for a while now, but I've never mustered the will to go through the process. This script may just be what I needed to start.
I just want to learn. Unfortunately those days with simple source commentary long gone. Hence whilst we have this good tutorial about setup … but how you start to learn more about.
Re: Easylkb: Easy Linux Kernel Builder
#5I've wanted to do some Linux kernel development for a while now, but I've never mustered the will to go through the process. This script may just be what I needed to start.
If you want to get a good introduction, I recommend the bootlin kernel course. All course material is available on their website.
Re: Easylkb: Easy Linux Kernel Builder
#6I've wanted to do some Linux kernel development for a while now, but I've never mustered the will to go through the process. This script may just be what I needed to start.
I just want to learn. Unfortunately those days with simple source commentary long gone. Hence whilst we have this good tutorial about setup … but how you start to learn more about.
Considering and size and complexity of the Linux kernel, I don't think any amount of source code comments would help you much, unless you already have a strong understanding of the underlying subsystem you want to hack on.
"Understanding the Linux kernel", and "Linux device drivers" are pretty good, pragmatic books IMHO to give you a solid understanding of most useful subsystem.
As for this kernel building script, I guess it could be handy, but unless you're hacking very frequently I never found the actual build of the kernel to be the more cumbersome part.
Re: Easylkb: Easy Linux Kernel Builder
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just want to learn. Unfortunately those days with simple source commentary long gone. Hence whilst we have this good tutorial about setup … but how you start to learn more about.
Considering and size and complexity of the Linux kernel, I don't think any amount of source code comments would help you much, unless you already have a strong understanding of the underlying subsystem you want to hack on. "Understanding the Linux kernel", and "Linux device drivers" are pretty good, pragmatic books IMHO to give you a solid understanding of most useful subsystem. As for this kernel building script, I…
the kernel and device drivers are both a bit out of date unfortunately, hope LF can found new revisions of them.
Re: Easylkb: Easy Linux Kernel Builder
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just want to learn. Unfortunately those days with simple source commentary long gone. Hence whilst we have this good tutorial about setup … but how you start to learn more about.
Considering and size and complexity of the Linux kernel, I don't think any amount of source code comments would help you much, unless you already have a strong understanding of the underlying subsystem you want to hack on. "Understanding the Linux kernel", and "Linux device drivers" are pretty good, pragmatic books IMHO to give you a solid understanding of most useful subsystem. As for this kernel building script, I…
How relevant are these books today? They were both written in 2005.
Re: Easylkb: Easy Linux Kernel Builder
#9Mind. Officially. Blown. Sometimes the coincidental timeliness of things popping up on Hacker News is just weird. u ROCK deepseagirl!
I've recently wanted to start building Linux kernels and play with device drivers again. Wanted to build and then execute on top of QEMU. Downloaded, configured, and built Linux kernel 6.6 following recipes from arch and a few other places. Doing a reasonable .config was a painful process (picking what to include etc.) The kernel build took several hours. The resulting image refused to boot under Virtual Machine Manager, to say nothing of using gdb etc. to interactively debug the kernel.
So, I figured I was looking at a solid weekend of googling, stack-overflowing, swearing, reading kernel Documentation files etc. and finally getting everything set up and working happily.
NOT! The easylkb script did the entire thing completely automatically, culminating in a login prompt on a running virtual machine!! The Linux kernel .config was one of the standard ones I believe, but I hadn't yet found it. The complete kernel build took on the order of several minutes instead of several hours.
There were a couple of minor issues I had with easylkb, which I will share as comments on github.
Re: Easylkb: Easy Linux Kernel Builder
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Considering and size and complexity of the Linux kernel, I don't think any amount of source code comments would help you much, unless you already have a strong understanding of the underlying subsystem you want to hack on. "Understanding the Linux kernel", and "Linux device drivers" are pretty good, pragmatic books IMHO to give you a solid understanding of most useful subsystem. As for this kernel building script, I…
How relevant are these books today? They were both written in 2005.
A bit out of date, but not to the point of being useless. I still give them to juniors and interns that want to learn more about kernel work. There's also a much more recent (2022) book called Linux Device Driver Development published by packt. In general, these sorts of books are mainly useful for "what not to do", as general architecture stuff is usually well documented by source code examples and in-kernel docs.