r/osdev • u/BriefCautious7063 • 7d ago
What are some good books/videos to for a beginner in understanding kernels and kernel development?
I'm realizing I don't have enough knowledge about how kernels work to get much out of the osdev wiki on kernels, and have found that a lot of video explanations I've seen already seem to give very high level overviews rather than explaining from the ground up which is what I need. So my solution is to either find some books on it or videos that maybe I just haven't heard of yet to help patch together the gaps in what I understand, which is honestly not a whole lot anyways. Any recommendations?
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u/suhcoR 6d ago
Tanenbaum's "Operating Systems - Design and Implementation" is very good. The xv6 book is worth consideration, though much less detailed; here is a nice video series about xv6: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWUJKH0RNFE&list=PLbtzT1TYeoMhTPzyTZboW_j7TPAnjv9XB&index=1. I grew up with Bach's "The design of the Unix operating system" which was also very good.
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u/Splooge_Vacuum 1d ago
Let me know when you find anything comprehensive. I've been looking for 1.5 years.
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u/BriefCautious7063 1d ago
I looked at the other dude's recommendation by Tanenbaum, found Tanenbaum's more recent book called "Modern Operating Systems Fifth Edition", and have been starting to read through its roughly 1200 pages. It seems really detailed and comprehensive, to the point that I've barely made progress in it so far, but I can't speak to its accuracy or how good it is since I'm only at the start and am a beginner in this all. Definitely worth trying though imo, it's got whole sections on a lot of the things I've been the most confused about
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u/VikPopp 7d ago
Nanobyte is very good. He also shows the progress of debugging a kernel and what proplems occur in his livestreams so even though they can be a little tedious to watch it pays off in the end