[iUsedToCode]

God, i love human ingenuity. You are real engineers. I only have experience doing real high level stuff -- the easy parts, so i didn't follow most of the text. It's impressive that there are people who understand the boxes we all take for granted and can fine tune them.

It's also awesome how it all isn't a huge, inexplicable mess. I cannot make a CRUD php app without dirty hacks, you mess with 40 years of programming effort by thousands of people and it still behaves sanely.

When the AI comes, will it appreciate how hard we tried? I sure hope so.

Sorry for being off topic. IT is great and it's stuff like this that reminds me of it.

[luckydude]

If it helps you at all, I just wrote this up for a guy I work with who hasn't done kernel programming. I started learning how to wack on the kernel about 30 years ago but I still remember the horror of being stuck at an adb prompt and having absolutely no clue what to do next :)

I'm reading through the zfs code and I can see why the kernel is intimidating, all this state you have to gather up to make sense of it. One thing that helps is there are patterns. Just like device drivers, file systems all lock mostly the same way, have a certain pattern. You can blindly follow that and get stuff done. Eventually you have to understand what you are doing but you'd be amazed at how far you can go faking it. That's what I did while I was learning and I did tons of useful work sort of "blind". Eventually stuff comes into focus, the architecture comes first, then the arcane details (usually). And even though I was working in the file system code, there was some stuff (the whole hat_ layer) that I never bothered to learn/memorize, it just worked, I wasn't changing it, shrug. I have a pretty good idea what it was doing at the general level but would have to go learn the details if I wanted to change it.

Kernel hacking is fun and apparently isn't that common a skill any more, people like the comfort of userland. I'm no rocket scientist and I got pretty comfortable in SunOS, IRIX, Sys III, Sys V, etc. Unless you are trying to rewrite the whole thing in a clean room, it's really not that hard. It's hard to know all the details about everything but it is rare that you need to (and even more rare to find someone who knows all that stuff).

If this sort of thing seems interesting, you should grab a kernel and figure out how to build and install it, make a new syscall called im_a_stud() that does some random thing, add it, call it. Off you go :)

[kev009]

This is fabulous, you need to post it somewhere more permanent :)

[luckydude]

If one guy does what I suggested I'll start a blog. But people mostly just read, they don't do. I'll do if they do, I'd love to be helping people do more, I'm old, it's the kids that need to take on the task. So to be clear, I'll blog if someone adds a syscall and figures out how to call it. FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris, hell, Windows (but I'll need to be educated enough to know that they did it), whatever OS makes you happy.

[luckydude]

BTW, I was being sort of bitch on that. If someone wants to add a syscall and figure out how to call it, I'll help. I'll have to look up the details but I've done before, it's not that hard. So hit me up if you want to do it and/or make me blog.

[eleitl]

When AI comes it will do things with cellular hardware in a massively distributed way which has almost nothing to do with CPUs and code as you know them.

Provably optimal classical computing substrate is a hardware cellular automaton. We know this, we've known this for 50 years at least, we still don't go there directly.