Subject: Re: Device driver text with source. Date: 1992年1月13日 01:34:24 +0200 From: Linus Benedict Torvalds <torvalds@cc.helsinki.fi>
"Thomas E. Kunselman": "Device driver text with source." (Jan 12, 17:56):
> I was reading misc.books.technical and thought someone on here might be
> interested in this. I'm a new subscriber, so hope this hasn't been
> posted before.
>
> Writing UNIX Device Drivers
> By George Pajari [deleted]
A small word of warnig: linux looks like a unix, but I implemented it
from scratch, and with very little litterature on how things "should" be
done. In fact the only things I knew were how the interface should
appear to the user: the result is not the same as either minix, sysv or
bsd when it comes to the kernel innards. Some of the choises I made
worked out well, some not so well. So far nothing has been a total
disaster: most things have been relatively easily adaptible to the linux
kernel (demand-loading and paging comes to mind: they were essentially
painless to do for linux).
This doesn't mean that this book wouldn't be very practical (it probably
is), but it does mean that you cannot take the code and use it directly
for linux. Of course the underlying algorithm may well work splendidly.
The three books I had as references were:
"Maurice J Bach: The design of the unix operating system". This is a
nice general text, and has some simple algorithms for some things.
Recommended.
"Tanenbaum: Operating Systems, Design and Implementation". Hmm. I didn't
use this book much for the actual implementation (other than getting the
minix filesystem design out of it), but unless you understand the
principles ast writes about, unix kernel hacking is difficult at best.
"Crawford & Gelsinger: Programming the 80386". What can I say. If you
want to program the 386-specific stuff, this is a must.
Linus