Linux kernel hacker Greg Kroah Hartman's June 5, 2008 talk at Google titled "The Linux Kernel" was chock-full of details about kernel development. I noted down some of the the things he said. Please note that the talk was delivered on June 5th, 2008 and all stats mentioned by GKH are relative to that date.

Linux i386 Boot Code HOWTO

More DTrace envy

This is a recording of the first Kernel Walkthrough given by Bart Trojanowski for the Ottawa Canada Linux Users Group. He starts with a presentation introducing some Linux development background, file layout and data types. The code walkthrough covers som

The Linux kernel is an interesting project to study for a number of reasons. It is one of the largest individual components on almost any Linux system. It also features one of the fastest-moving development processes and involves more developers than any other open source project. This paper looks at how that process works, focusing on nearly three years of kernel history as represented by the 2.6.11 through 2.6.24 releases.

Linux network stack, focusing on how things fit together, and help relative beginners understand the machinery, rather than giving a full-blown highly detailed cross reference

# 9.2 Million lines of code. # Increases by 10% each year. # Te core kernel is 5 percent of the code, device drivers is approximately 55 percent and the balance is architecture, networking etc. # 4500 lines added. 1800 removed and 1500 modified per day. # Kernel actively developed 24/7, 365 days a year. # No more stable/unstable kernel. Earlier even numbers eg. 2.3 was for unstable and odd number eg. 2.4 was stable, this process is discontinued. # Hierarchy system but not person dependant. # Security updates after the release goes as x.x.x.. example, security fix for 2.6.19 go as 2.6.19.1 2.6.19.2 and so on. # New release every 2-3 Month. # 2399 Unique developers. 1/2 of them contributed only 1-2 patches. # Number 1 funding comes from Amaetuers, or people who code as a hobby in the spare time # Number 2 funding comes from Red Hat, Number 3, IBM and Number 4 Novell.

There are a few SMP related macros, like CONFIG_SMP, CONFIG_X86_LOCAL_APIC, CONFIG_X86_IO_APIC, CONFIG_MULTIQUAD and CONFIG_VISWS. I will ignore code that requires CONFIG_MULTIQUAD or CONFIG_VISWS, which most people don't care (if not using IBM high-end multiprocessor server or SGI Visual Workstation).

Buffer-caching hints

Linux and USB 2.0