Hi all,

I am teaching myself C(from K&R2), and am also interested in learning about unix-like operating systems in general, and how kernels really work internally. I currently have two OS books, "Operating Systems: Design and Implementation Second Edition" by Andrew Tanenbaum and also a general college level operating systems fundamentals book entitled "Operating System Concepts" by Silberschatz, Galvin, and Gagne (I think this series is known as the "dinosaur" books because the cover has dinosaurs on it). My question is, would I be better served by jumping right off into studying either Minix or Linux 0.01, or do I need to concentrate on fundamentals first and leave the source code study for sometime in the future ? Of the two source code pools(Minix or Linux), which do you think would be the better choice and why ?

Thanks in advance,

dmsynck

That depends very much on the level of your programming expertise. If you are a novice then the answer is to learn to program before you attempt to learn the internals of an operating system. If you are an experienced programmer then learning C while studying an operating systems' source code is doable.


Minix is the better choice hands down. First of all you have a textbook on Minix and Minix was specifically written by Tannenbaum to be the example OS for his operating system course. Reading the book and following the examples in Minix is far easier than trying to decipher the logic in any version of Linux.

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Steve Stites

Thanks for the advice. I will concentrate on becoming proficient with C first, then decide where to go from there. The reasoning behind asking about the choice of either Minix or the original Linux kernel is that Linux 0.01 is supposedly about 10,000 lines of code. Even though this is classified as "small", it still seems a rather daunting amount of code to make sense of. I don't know the approximate number of lines of code in Minix 2.0, but I would be willing to bet that it is considerably less. If anyone knows, I would be interested in knowing the approximate number.