To get the most out of this book, we expect you to have knowledge and experience in the following:
- Know your way around a Linux system, on the command line (the shell).
- The C programming language.
- It's not mandatory but experience with Linux system programming concepts and technologies will greatly help.
The details on hardware and software requirements, as well as their installation, are covered completely and in depth in Chapter 1, Kernel Workspace Setup. It's critical that you read it in detail and follow the instructions therein.
Also, we have tested all the code in this book (it has its own GitHub repository as well) on these platforms:
- x86_64 Ubuntu 18.04 LTS guest OS (running on Oracle VirtualBox 6.1)
- x86_64 Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS guest OS (running on Oracle VirtualBox 6.1)
- x86_64 Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS native OS
- ARM Raspberry Pi 3B+ (running both its "distro" kernel as well as our custom 5.4 kernel); lightly tested
- x86_64 CentOS 8 guest OS (running on Oracle VirtualBox 6.1); lightly tested
We assume that, when running Linux as a guest (VM), the host system is either Windows 10 or later (of course, even Windows 7 will work), or a recent Linux distribution (for example, Ubuntu or Fedora), or even macOS.
If you are using the digital version of this book, we advise you to type the code yourself or, better, access the code via the GitHub repository (link available in the next section). Doing so will help you avoid any potential errors related to the copying and pasting of code.
I strongly recommend that you follow the empirical approach: not taking anyone's word on anything at all, but trying it out and experiencing it for yourself. Hence, this book gives you many hands-on experiments and kernel code examples that you can and must try out yourself; this will greatly aid you in making real progress and deeply learning and understanding various aspects of Linux kernel development.
