Re: [Kernelbook-feedback] suggestions for the book

[Gary L. M. <ga...@ca...>]

Thanks for the comments --- and have no fear: I will be saving them
all for careful consideration ;)

>>>>> "C" == Chongkyoon, Rim <her...@se...> writes:

    C> On Tue, 9 May 2000 pv...@bi... wrote: |Hello, |here are
    C> my suggestions to the kernel book: | |1) a topic on how to
    C> convert existing drivers |from FreeBSD (or other OpenBSD,
    C> NetBSD),WinNT, W95 to Linux |

    C> It's very interesting and necessary topic. But I think it's not
    C> about the kernel itself. Probably a new book about the Linux
    C> device driver is necessary.

I agree with both points ;) 

I'd included porting from NT->Linux and we hopefully have people from
CreativeLabs working on that chapter, but it is very true that porting
from BSD/SCO would also be useful; it's not the focus of the book, but
I think it fits in with the general theme of "How do you _use_ the
kernel sources".

I do know Alessandro is working on an update to his book, so that will
probably cover the general topic of device drivers.  Our task is more
on the functional specs for the existing driver types, how they communicate
with the kernel.  "How long" is an interesting question; if the Device
Driver Toolkit is updated for 2.4, the time to complete a module can be
cut way down, but without it, you can expect to add a day or two to
distill an existing driver down to a template.  It's a very hard
call to make mostly because the 'module' part of your code is very
small compared to the 'what it does' part, and the latter part can
be as simple as echoing to a port (as in the voice synth) or as
complex as rasterizing images for driving a plotter.

Thanks for those other points; the macros is a good point and belongs
in the "Speaking Kernel" chapter; there is a section there on Kernel
DEFINEs and the more global of these will be in there; those specific
to various areas will go into those other chapters.

We're still toying with adding a 'reference' section which simply
lists APIs as man-page like listings, much like you find in the middle
of the Perl book; Tim Waugh's kernel-doc utility can generate these
automatically (if we massage all the kernel files for GNOME-style comments).
It would add tremendous bulk to the book, but I often find that these are
the sections I use the most on those other books --- now, in Perl or
DocBook, those sections are a small fraction the size of what it would
be in the Kernel, so I wonder, would it really be useful?  Or would it
be more useful to have the book stay at the block-diagram level and just
include these reference pages on CD?

I still need an author for the porting-Linux chapter.  My original author
had to leave the project and its pretty rare to find someone who really
follows that issue and understands what was required to get from the i86
to even strange platforms like the Sparc or the Mac.  If you have any
recommendations, please let me know.

-- 
Gary Lawrence Murphy <ga...@te...> TeleDynamics Communications Inc
Business Innovations Through Open Source Systems: http://www.teledyn.com
Free Internet for a Free O/S? - http://www.teledyn.com/products/FreeWWW/
"Computers are useless.  They can only give you answers."(Pablo Picasso)