A Review Of The Best Kernel Books

Hardware Books

No matter if you are on the black hat side or the white hat side, one of the best things about being someone who is a hacker is messing with the underlying kernel of the operating system. People who call themselves hackers are people who are interested in technology and the underlying parts of it. There are plenty of people who like gadgets and love playing around with them. A true hacker is someone who looks at the same gadget that someone is playing with and wonders how does it work. They want to know all of the ins and outs of the device. And that is why hackers love working on the kernel of an operating system. The kernel is what makes the computer go. In this article we will go a little more into detail of what the kernel does and then we will give you a couple of good books to go through if you want to hack on the kernel yourself.

What is the kernel exactly?

If you interact with a computer at any time then you are going to interact with the kernel of that computer. And it is just not computers either. Any device that has an operating system in it has a kernel. Before we describe what a kernel is we should describe an operating system s a whole. It is hard to talk about one without talking about the other since one lives inside of the other. An operating system allows you to interact with your computer. When you type something on the screen just like I am now then you are interacting with the operating system. Most of the time when you hear people talking about a computer you are really hearing about its operating system. Windows, OS X, Linux are all operating systems. Inside of that operating system is a kernel. The operating system is usually split into two parts, the user land and the kernel. The user land portion of the computer is what you use whenever you get on the computer. The kernel portion of the computer is restricted to you. It is where the operating system is able to talk the actual hardware. It doesn't want any program from the user land portion of the machine to be able to interact directly with the hardware. To do that you must instead use hooks or functions to talk to kernel first.

The kernel is the part of the operating system that saves files to the hard drive, allows packets of data from the internet to flow through the machine, and allows the keyboard to show letters on the screen when you press on it. Anything that you do that needs to interact with the actual hardware is done by the kernel. The kernel also controls parts of the machine that have nothing to do with you. When a computer is running there are thousands of operations happening even without you touching anything. The kernel of the operating system controls all of that. Access and control of the CPU and the memory is all done by the kernel. It is a pretty interesting topic and it is no wonder why so many people want to play around inside of the kernel.

Book for hacking the kernel

When we say hack the kernel in this context we are not talking about destroying anything. We are talking about the original context of hacking which is finding out how something works. There are plenty of online places that will allow you to be able to see this information but there is probably nowhere where the information is more thorough than some of the books that are out on the market. We will list a few of them here.

The first book we will talk about is Modern Operating Systems by Andrew Tannenbaum. It is a great book for people who are just getting started. It tells you step by step how the operating system works. It will give you many of the fine details of what the kernel does exactly. This book is considered one of the classics when it comes to learning about operating systems. So if you are a beginner this is a great place to start.

The second book we will talk about is Operating System concepts by Abraham Scilberschatz. Like the first book this one again takes you on a journey to the internals of an operating system and how they work. Again this is a good book for starters.

The third book that we will talk about is Understanding the Linux Kernel from Oreilly Press. This book takes you around the internals of the Linux operating system. Now with this book there is no more theory like the other two books and you are actually getting code to look at. While you are reading this book you can also go to kernel.org and look at the actual source code for the Linux operating system beyond the examples in the book. This is great for intermediate to advanced users.

As you can see the kernel can be an interesting topic. And with these books that we have listed you will be able to learn more about it.