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by vezzy-fnord 3969 days ago
The "Linux Insides" book is a great effort, however I consider it to be of relatively limited use for conceptual understanding. It's more an annotated tour of the source code, read out in a literal fashion. Probably quite useful for aspiring kernel hackers to get acquainted with key data structures and subsystems, but not much in the way of a priori knowledge.

The LWN kernel index (https://lwn.net/Kernel/Index/) has always been much better at bridging the source code and the theory into good technical articles.

1 comments

I think the author wrote this series of articles to better understand the kernel source code himself, an effort that I praise. It is probably the same reason why most of us write blogs: our articles are much more interesting to write than to read. The fact that somebody can find the "Linux insides" articles useful is mostly a welcome side effect, not the original drive that put them into existence. Again, this is only my personal understanding of the author's intention, which I admire.