On 6/27/13, Brian Kim <briansa...@gmail.com> wrote: > howdy all, > > As a junior computer engineering major who has dreams of developing an > operating system more ubiquitous than ms windows, I have come to appreciate > the complexity and elegance of both the freebsd os and community. While > achieving proficiency in C programming yet lacking in both UNIX utility > know-how and shell scripting, I would rate my hacker savvy to be on an > intermediate level. By the time I graduate from college, I hope to have a > thorough understanding of the bsd kernel on the lowest level. > > Don't get me wrong though: while my end-game may be to develop my own > operating system, I will forever be a contributor to freebsd. As my > understanding of computers develops, you will undoubtedly see my name > appear more frequently on the freebsd-hacker emails. Unfortunately, I am > just not at the level of understanding just yet. > > To start, I was wondering if someone could briefly explain the operations > and function calls that occur at boot time. I wish to thoroughly examine > the freebsd source code but I'm afraid the sheer volume of code that exists > leaves me with no real starting point for my research. > > Thank you all for your time. > > -- > Best Wishes, > Brian Kim
Boot's probably not as bad as it seems. There's boot0, boot1, boot2, loader, and kernel. So those would probably be the best places to start digging. A few hundred k of code if I'm not mistaken. Not entirely unmanageable. Some ideas that might help: - Scan source for comments and function/method names - Use doxygen to generate high-level source documentation - Generate UML diagrams from source (class and sequence diagrams would probably be most useful) - As Warren suggested, read all the documentation you can find - Google - Take notes as you go, publish them on a blog, and share the URL with us! -David _______________________________________________ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
