What is Kernel hacking

If you are interested in installing and using a Unix system based on the linux kernel, you won't have any problem in finding all the documentation you need. In fact, there exist several excellent books that teach how to install linux and how to run it. Furthermore, many courses are taught in many countries on the same topics.

If your problem is how to modify the linux kernel and how to evaluate the impact of the changes you made (we call this kind of programmer's behavior ``kernel hacking''), then you won't find as much documentation as in the previous case. In fact, you can find almost anything on the net, except that is scattered around many places and not all the documents you will find are outstanding, while many are obsolete.

So, the ambitious purpose of this ``Kernel hacking'' course is to describe in a coherent way all you should know to become a reasonable kernel hacker.

Depending on the energy of the teachers and on the response of the audience, we plan to cover several crucial areas such as: modifiying the kernel, writing new drivers, linux real-time, linux embedded, linux on palmtops, porting of linux on new hardware platforms, kernel support for networking security, etc.

All topics will be approached in a pragmatic manner: every lecture will consist in illustrating the required steps needed to resolve a specific problem and all programming examples illustrated in the lectures will be documented under the item ``Lectures notes'' in our site.