[HN Gopher] Learning operating system development using Linux ke...
___________________________________________________________________
Learning operating system development using Linux kernel and
Raspberry Pi
Author : weeber
Score : 401 points
Date : 2020-06-23 08:00 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (s-matyukevich.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (s-matyukevich.github.io)
| ObsoleteNerd wrote:
| The offical Raspberry Pi distro of Linux is already called
| "Raspberry Pi OS":
|
| https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspberry-pi-os/
| shakna wrote:
| Raspbian was renamed to "Raspberry Pi OS" on the 27th of May,
| 2020. That's so recent you can assume that there'll be a whole
| bunch of naming conflicts and/or confusion.
| Yuioup wrote:
| Renamed from "Raspbian". Perhaps the article was written before
| the name change?
| amatecha wrote:
| Yeah the github repo (
| https://github.com/s-matyukevich/raspberry-pi-os ) shows it
| as being created just a little under 2 years ago
| johnnycab wrote:
| I hope there is an official release of 64-bit version soon.
|
| https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=117&t=275...
| thomond wrote:
| This project seems to go back at least 2 years while Raspbian
| changed it's name very recently.
| teleforce wrote:
| If you are looking to learn operating system concepts using RPi
| there is a new textbook by Prof. Vanderbauwhede, under ARM
| textbook initiative [1].
|
| I think for educational purposes it will be very interesting and
| useful if someone develop from scratch a simple System V UNIX for
| RPi based on Bach's description in his seminal book on "The
| Design of the UNIX Operating System" [2]. The book also covers
| multi processors topic as supported by modern platforms such as
| RPi.
|
| [1]https://www.arm.com/resources/education/books/operating-
| syst...
|
| [2]https://github.com/suvratapte/Maurice-Bach-
| Notes/blob/master...
| bla3 wrote:
| Is the ebook of the textbook a regular PDF/epub/mobi or is it
| only viewable in their viewer apps? The page doesn't say, and I
| don't want to spend money on it and then realize it's not a
| real download.
| jakamau wrote:
| I was curious about that as well. The official ARM site
| doesn't list one but another distributor lists the related
| ISBN as epub.
|
| https://www.vitalsource.com/products/operating-systems-
| found...
| pumanoir wrote:
| The "book" you download from this website is _not_ an epub.
| You must use their apps to read it.
| pricci wrote:
| I'm interested in that book but I can't tell if I can follow
| along using a RPi Zero or I need a specific version. Can't find
| a preview of the book.
| pumanoir wrote:
| They focus on rpi 3b
| ngcc_hk wrote:
| does it go through the process?
| vips7L wrote:
| > develop from scratch a simple System V UNIX for RPi
|
| A few people seem to have ported xv6 to arm.
|
| https://github.com/david50407/xv6-rpi
|
| https://github.com/houcheng/xv6-armv7/
| lewis1028282 wrote:
| Might be a bit controversial but I found writing drivers for
| Linux on my raspberry pi helped me understand kernels, virtual
| memory etc. I used Linux Device Drivers (ldd3) which is free
| online. The book was written for the 2.6 kernel but someone on
| GitHub updated the code for the latest kernels.
| vmladenov wrote:
| This doesn't seem controversial. It's how the operating systems
| class[1] was structured at University of Illinois, though the
| target was a VM instead of physical hardware. It was easier to
| reset things when your new scheduler module instantly crashes
| the OS.
|
| [1]https://courses.engr.illinois.edu/cs423/sp2016/
| jabedude wrote:
| Hello, could you share the link for the updated version of
| LDD3?
| Ristovski wrote:
| I was able to find this, which appears to have been updated
| for 4.x kernels, https://github.com/jgraha8/ldd3-examples-
| modern
| nullbuffer wrote:
| Alternatively there's this:
| https://github.com/martinezjavier/ldd3
| stevekemp wrote:
| I've never written a driver myself, because all my hardware is
| supported. But I've certainly added new PCI IDs to existing
| drivers, and done that kind of low-level learning.
|
| I expect if I found a random piece of hardware that was close
| to an existing one that adding the driver, or updating things
| so that it worked on the new hardware would be possible. It's
| just not a situation I've come across.
|
| What I found useful/educational was writing a simple linux
| security module.
|
| 1. LSMs are essentially isolated. 2. They don't care about
| hardware. 3. You can do lots of things with them. Even horrid
| evils things.
|
| For example I put together the following module in which the
| kernel calls back to userspace every single time you execute a
| binary, to decide whether it should be permitted or not:
|
| https://github.com/skx/linux-security-modules
|
| (And yes, I appreciate that is almost exactly as horrid as it
| sounds! So much fun to hack around with though.)
| lewis1028282 wrote:
| You can just write char drivers that operate a slab of kernel
| memory, and implement all the syscalls like open, read, write
| on that piece of memory.
| Narishma wrote:
| Why would it be controversial?
| Frost1x wrote:
| >Why would it be controversial?
|
| Not OP but my perspective is that much of software
| development, engineering, and practices become cult like,
| often without theoretical or empirical basis.
|
| I'm rarely surprised anymore when I see criticism of one
| approach over another. Someone may think "the way" to learn
| Linux kernel development isn't what OP suggested and there's
| a cult of people who agree who will adamantly concur to a
| fault.
| mikece wrote:
| In terms of teaching fundamentals of operating system theory and
| systems programming, is there such a thing as an operating system
| kernel written in Python or some language which is meant to be
| easy to hack on for educational purposes? I wonder how useful
| that would be for a CS student, taking the complexity of C, C++,
| or Rust out of the picture and just running a kernel in a VM for
| educational purposes.
| mywittyname wrote:
| An OS course taught in Python is really just a data structures
| and algorithms course. When you ignore the hardware aspect,
| topics like scheduling and virtual memory management are about
| selecting an algorithm with the appropriate trade-offs.
|
| My OS course was hacking on x86 Linux in C. The C wasn't really
| the difficult part. Honestly, neither was the assembly, as most
| of was boilerplate: here's how you configure to registers for a
| system call, here's how you trigger the interrupt for the
| system call, here's how you get the return codes, etc.
|
| I don't think the class would have been nearly as valuable if C
| were replaced with Python. At that point, so many of the
| interesting details would be hand-waved away that it wouldn't
| really be all that different from the other programming classes
| I took.
| simion314 wrote:
| IMO this topic is entangled with hardware, the student needs to
| do a course in hardware and how CPUs work, do some simple
| assembly coding, after that C is a natural progression. If C is
| too complex for some students then system programming and OS
| development is not for them. For educational and getting
| started I think https://www.nand2tetris.org is a good source
| material, the complexity or real world stuff is missing there
| so you can focus on essentials.
| chillfox wrote:
| I don't know of any specifically made for teaching, but there
| is biscuit made in Go[0] and Lilith made in Crystal[1].
|
| [0] https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/projects/biscuit.html [1]
| https://github.com/ffwff/lilith
| DC-3 wrote:
| There's no point abstracting away the nitty-gritty. OS dev _is_
| the nitty-gritty.
| Santosh83 wrote:
| You could write a Java based virtual kernel designed to run
| within the JVM and manage child processes I suppose, but what
| is the real world utility of such a thing?
|
| Almost everything to do with kernels is about directly writing
| to memory addresses and ports and these things can't be done
| with a managed language, at least not without a significant
| runtime doing all the grunt work, at which point you'll need to
| understand much of the runtime's internals and at that point,
| you may as well have started out with a small C/C++/Rust
| kernel, plenty of which exist.
| shakna wrote:
| There are actually plenty of languages that can lead you down
| this path, including some designed for the purpose.
|
| For real world learning, C is still what you want. It is one of
| the easier roads through.
|
| However, here's a just few languages that can let you build a
| kernel up quickly:
|
| + Forth. It is well suited for the purpose. A tiny bit of
| assembly, and then just a bunch of definitions and you've built
| it all from the ground up. But if you think C is too complex
| for learning, then the idea of moving to a stack-based language
| could get in the way.
|
| + Lisp. The Symbolic Lisp machines might be in the past, but
| the various versions of Lisp are still flexible enough to let
| you build an OS, and lots of CS students do.
|
| + Lua. It is only slightly higher level than C, but with fun
| things like coroutines, hash tables, dynamic typing and GC. Due
| to its C99 nature and the desire to keep the language
| constrained, it runs on bare metal great. You don't have to
| modify Lua to run it baremetal on a Pi. [0]
|
| [0] http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2020-01/msg00157.html
| cwoolfe wrote:
| C is a language which is closer to hardware than Python, so
| you'll find it to be the language of OS programming. In fact,
| Python is written in C. I think trying to do OS programming in
| Python would actually be more difficult than learning C.
|
| If you are a solid programmer who already knows Python,
| learning C would only take 2-4 weeks. The benefit is worth the
| investment.
|
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10904721/is-it-possible-...
| lzlz wrote:
| Actually using C or C++ is the most straightforward painless
| way to learn kernel dev. C is not complex at all. What you need
| to learn first is something like what nand2tetris offers, at
| least the first part. Usually you will have to do some
| variation of nand2tetris in the first or second year of
| undergrad.
| glouwbug wrote:
| Correct. Try these two:
|
| https://github.com/DoctorWkt/acwj
|
| https://github.com/cfenollosa/os-tutorial
| vertex-four wrote:
| Depending on what, exactly, you want to hack on, building
| components on top of seL4 could be a way to go. There's a large
| collection of libraries built on top of it, that you can
| replace as you feel like -
| https://docs.sel4.systems/projects/available-user-components...
| - and there's a few different options for communication between
| them (seL4's IPC, shared memory, etc).
|
| You could easily get a stripped-down interpreter or something
| running in that environment.
| OldTechSucks wrote:
| I want to learn about firmware development. I have been playing
| with rpi gpio and arduino i2c but have no idea how to start with
| firmware development. please throw at me references, i'm very
| fragile but i'll take it and learn from.
| [deleted]
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2020-06-23 23:00 UTC)