Chapter 1: Introduction to Kernel Development
Linux started as a hobby project in 1991 by a Finnish student, Linus Torvalds. The project has gradually grown and continues to do so, with roughly a thousand contributors around the world. Nowadays, Linux is a must, in embedded systems as well as on servers. A kernel is a central part of an operating system, and its development is not straightforward. Linux offers many advantages over other operating systems; it is free of charge, well documented with a large community, is portable across different platforms, provides access to the source code, and has a lot of free open source software.
This book will try to be as generic as possible. There is a special topic, known as the device tree, that is not a full x86 feature yet. This topic will be dedicated to ARM processors, especially those that fully support the device tree. Why those architectures? Because they are mostly used on desktops and servers (for x86), as well as embedded systems (ARM).
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
- Setting up the development environment
- Understanding the kernel configuration process
- Building your kernel
