1. About the Book

1.1. Introduction

Linux Kernel Programming is one of the most exciting thing for the beginners in System Programming. With time a lot of excellent books were published on it but the books were written to cover everything about the Linux Kernel and thus had a widespread scope. These books enabled to a lot of people to take kernel programming as their career chocices or as a hobby.

I have been seeing a lot of queries on the kernelnewbies mailing list where people are requesting for the documents to start with. Most of them want to go through a guided course or something.

People (even I) generally suggest them the following books:

  1. The Design Of Unix Operating System
  2. Linux Kernel Development
  3. Understanding The Unix Kernel

For the learners who can’t wait to get into code - I have written this small book.

This book uses Ubuntu Server LTS releases.

This book will deal with the folowing topics.

  • Compilation of Kernel
  • Code Walkthrough using cscope and ctags
  • Kernel Modules
  • Kernel Module Programming
  • Proc Interface
  • Data Strucutures available in the Kernel
  • Character Device Drivers

The section has many Hands-On exercises which will enable you to learn how to write code for kernel modules, and make changes to the linux kernel. This section is very essential for getting a good feel of kernel programming.

Note that the book is entirely not my work, I have taken references from a lot of documents and articles from the open source community.

Happy Hacking !!