Last week I spent a week home, call it vacation if you wish. Other years I was always very busy doing all kind of geeky stuff, you know what I mean, right? Well, this year I wanted to really do nothing and just reload my batteries and get some extra sleep (in my normal life, i sleep about 4 hours a day).
Because I didn’t want to spend most of the time behind a computer, I picked up a book a had bought half a year ago. The book is kernel development by Robert love. I’m only at page 40 or something, but I have to say I already learned a lot. Because i’m always programming in higher languages you tend to forget sometimes how the underlaying system works. Because you are used to programming to a virtual machine, you don’t have to think about freeing you objects and how your datastructures are aligned,…
Reading the book I came to think about how different those 2 kinds of programming really are. I wonder if there are people around who like both, philip probably does, but for the rest I don’t actually know people who love the beauty of low level programming as wel as high level programming. To bad I haven’t got that much experience in the low level field. Besides a small patch in liferea and a patch I’m working on at the moment, my ansi C knowledge isn’t that great :s. Besides if you want to do kernel programming, you don’t have glib available and if I remember correctly you don’t even have libc available?!
Who knows, maybe after I’ve finished the book I’ll give a custom kernel module in a xen environment a swing, I’ll call it the helloworld-module or foobar-module 😛 and I’ll finally test out the remote debugging philip is always bragging about 😀