Best Advanced Linux Kernel Training? 153
hdxia writes "Can anybody recommend a good Linux kernel training course? I have had some Linux kernel hacking experience, but would like to further harden and improve my understanding of the kernel. I expect the course would be advanced. You may say that the best method would be to dig into the kernel myself, but I really want to have a chance to discuss and learn all aspects of the kernel with an experienced instructor."
Sorry to say (Score:3, Insightful)
Hire someone (Score:5, Insightful)
My suggestion would be to find someone who's pretty savvy in the area you're aimed at, and hire him or her (OK, let's face it, "him"...) for some lessons. Keep in mind that a good programmer is not the same as a good teacher, but if you find someone who can explain things the way you need to hear them then you won't need that many lessons to make a lot of progress - the cost could very well end up in the same league as a commercially-vended course.
I'm just guessing that finding a kernel guru willing to give up a month of Saturday afternoons at $300 a session will be easier than finding "Linux Kernel for Experts" at the downtown Learning Annex.
Re:obligatory? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Umm, we're programmers (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not surprising the software is so crumby, it's only surprising that it works at all.
No, experience is the worst teacher (Score:4, Insightful)
Teaching and doing (Score:3, Insightful)
Finding someone who is an expert in the linux kernel, *and* who can teach, and has the time and willingness to teach you one-on-one, will be a rare find indeed. ( Are you willing to pay them what they're worth for their background and ability? )
That person has probably already written a book [amazon.com].
Teach (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:No, experience is the worst teacher (Score:4, Insightful)
That just isn't true! Experience should include a lot of independent research and planning. It isn't like you're just blindly trying things to see if they work or not. The only real difference between school learning and experience based learning is that there are real things at stake when learning by experience. And that can be a great motivator.
-matthew
RTFML (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hire someone (Score:5, Insightful)
When it comes to this level of specialization you take what you can get, and be happy about it. There is a reason many Universities have brilliant professors doing incredible research who also happen to be poor teachers. (At least in the sciences.)
Re:Hire someone (Score:5, Insightful)
The gender ratio is pretty extreme, but it's not 100%--there *are* expert female kernel hackers.
Personal tutoring is a pretty expensive way to get an education, especially if it's in a fast-moving field whose experts are in demand for other work.
Off the top of my head:
And if people have told you that "the best method would be to dig into the kernel myself",... actually, in the end, it's probably the *only* way. There's a certain point in your study of any field where you just run out of "courses". That's good. It means you're ready to do real work, because you're at the point where people are still busy doing the work and figuring stuff out, and haven't yet figured out how to break it down into manageable chunks and explain it in a logical order, which is a great deal of work in and of itself.
Re:Getting Training vs. Getting Good (Score:3, Insightful)
Every sorcerer was once an apprentice. Every wizard was once a n00b. Even Linus, Bill, and Steve.
Re:obligatory? (Score:2, Insightful)
Not trying to be an asshole, but... (Score:2, Insightful)
...this made the front page? The course is called "Operating Systems," and it's taught at major universities, as someone previously mentioned. In many of these courses, the semester-long project is to develop your own distribution of Linux (as a class or group).
Re:Reads like a mailinglist posting by some H1B (Score:5, Insightful)
It would be nice if I could feel free to express myself and give a bit of humour to the world without worrying about offending somebody. Unfortunately there will always be the intolerant and Politically Correct among us who will project there own anxieties on other people.
Say anything good, bad or neutral that involves a "race", and that statement can be said to be "racial", but "racist" implies intolerance and dis-respect, and this is something I just don't see. Perhaps this is because I view ethnic and phenomic differences as trivial, and yet view humour and the creative use of words and ideas as a very important part of my personality. The sad thing is, is that I don't use humour a lot because I know there will always be some people who just don't "get it". So I just give up
Re:Operating Systems understanding + books + pract (Score:3, Insightful)
I can say that Robert Love's book, Linux Kernel Development (2004) is very well written and easy to read and understand. (print only)
There is also Greg Kroah-Harman's Linux Kernel in a nutshell at http://www.kroah.com/lkn/ [kroah.com] - free PDF download.
Re:Hire someone (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been teaching Linux Kernel Internals and Linux Device Driver courses (among others) since 1995 and other Un*x topics prior to that.
Many of the big names "outsource" their very technical training to third parties unless the topic is something related to an internal project (I won't name those companies here, but suffice to say that their names are abbreviations and usually three characters or less in length :)).
These training classes will cost the company $1k-$2k per student, depending on the exact nature of the course. This covers a 5-day class, 7-8 hours per day, with labs as practical for each topic. Obviously, in 5 days you're not going to get a lot of depth in any single topic, but a good instructor will be able to answer off-the-cuff questions during breaks between topics. I know that in a 10-15 minute break, I often get about 3 minutes to make a run to a restroom and spend the rest of the time going over details with one or more students. The most common areas of questions include processor scheduling (big changes in this area right now), virtual memory implementation details (especially the slab allocator and zoned memory concepts), and the block layer API. We don't get heavy into implementation details, but the student is expected to have at least some C background so that they can accomplish the lab exercises.
Some customers require detailed knowledge about specific subsystems and I will add a "chalk talk" ("dry erase talk"?) as time permits to cover those areas as much as possible. For example, a company that makes video poker machines running Linux might want details on hacking the interrupt handlers, while a company that builds disk storage units might want to talk about how best to support a custom RAID controller. Those types of things come up primarily in the Linux Device Driver course; the Internals course typically comes first in the curriculum and can be applied by application and system programmers to the code they write.
Most individuals are not going to be able to afford the associated costs, however. There are some training companies that offer "public" courses: I do those classes as well as on-site classes, but public classes for Internals don't often happen because there's not enough interest to fill the classroom with warm bodies. Send me a message if you're looking for such classes and I'll give you a list of vendors. If you opt to go the less expensive route, I suggest you get Robert Love's book on the Linux Kernel; overall it's a great book, but it does lack depth in one or two areas. After you understand what he covers there, then download the free book on the Linux VMM from
Sorry, I'm rambling. I'll now return you to your regularly scheduled pr0n viewing. :)
Re:No, experience is the worst teacher (Score:4, Insightful)
It depends on the environment, how much pressure you're under, and how much you know going into the situation. What you say is true if you throw someone who doesn't know much into a high pressure situation with high stakes. They're going to find the easiest and quickest solution possible. No question about that. But if a person is consistently pushed only a little bit beyond their capabilities with reasonable demands and stakes, I'm confident that it can be a constructive learning experience. This is even employed in school. You're given reasonable tasks/projects to gain experience. But eventually you outgrow the the kind of experience that a school can offer. Eventually you need to go into the real world. You might start as an intern, or a junior programmer, for example, until you learn from enough experience to move on....
A solid education is important as a foundation. I'd never dispute that.
-matthew
Re:obligatory? (Score:3, Insightful)
The replies to this comment seem to be along the lines of "they don't teach that at my university, so you're wrong." As a clarification to the parent, it should be noted that the CS 503 [purdue.edu] course taught at Purdue (cide1's and my university) has a lab where you have to implement a scheduler, a full virtual memory subsystem with demand paging, and a file system in the Xinu operating system on real hardware. If you break something, the only feedback you get is three beeps and a new boot prompt about 30 seconds later. No debugger. Non-deterministic execution. Minimal crash information. Anger, hate, and suffering. It's remarkably similar to my experience with Linux kernel hacking.
The CS 503 course provides a (relative to Linux) small implementation effort that provides a sample of what programming in a major OS kernel is like. From that perspective, cide1's comment is dead on. You can't expect a college course to give you the full story. At some point, you're going to have to teach yourself. Personally, I am content that I can read "Understanding the Linux Kernel" and "Linux Kernel Development" and understand all the different concepts without having to refer to another book.