Date: Thu, 01 Aug 2002 02:45:55 -0700 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: Sergey Lyubka <devnull@asitatech.ie> Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Assembly, Kernels and Bootstraps Message-ID: <3D490353.8A5A07D4@mindspring.com> References: <20020731161322.O5057-100000@boise.neuroflux.com> <20020801102424.GC97092@yoda.asitatech.ie>
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Sergey Lyubka wrote: > That question I presume is a sign of a more global need of good book > describing FreeBSD internals and philosophy behind it. > Linux community has an excellent 'Linux Device Drivers', > 'Understanding The Linux Kernel' etc; why not > FreeBSD community does have such source of knowledge ? > Reading the source code is far not enough. It can reveal the > technique, but leaves the phiosophy, historical issues and > relationships with other suff out from scope. > > Respected FreeBSD gurus, please answer on this. Share your knowledge :-) > What about you, Terry? Or you? 8-). Get the project to promise not to outdate the book for 6 months, so I can get paid for the time I spend on it in terms of book sales, and I'll write one. The problem comes down to the distance between -current and -stable, and the tendency to MFC tons of crap, rather than cutting a release off of -current. This whole "-current" thing has gotten way, way out of hand. I was six chapters into a FreeBSD 4.4 internals book at one point, when I lost a good chunk of it to the revamping of the locore.s code and the addition of KVAPAGES, and the MFC'ing of Matt's machdep.c changes for auto-tuning, etc., making a lot of my commentary and all but one of my examples non-workable on 4.5 and above. The SYN cache code (which I think is a mistake, unless SYN-cookie becomes incredibly difficult to turn on at all) blew out parts of chapter 5, and Luigi's changes blew out the rest of it, and part of chapter 4, which dealt with software interrupts, how to use them, when to use them, and what to watch out for. Even the stuff you've published is technically out of date, these days, since Peter Wemm and Matt Dillon have been having at rearranging the organization of the paging code (Bruce complained about this too, but for different reasons). It's just not possible to hit a moving target (or in this case, to document code that won't at least sit still at the interfaces). 8-(. I think that no one will write one until a FreeBSD release is cut off a tag off -current, so that MFC'ing doesn't happen any more. -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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