http://www.osnews.com/story/19784/Writing_a_Kernel_Module_for_FreeBSD Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2009, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Wed, 25 Nov 2009 18:46:02 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com http://osnews.com/thread?315467 http://osnews.com/thread?315467 First of all, I'd like to state that the article was interesting to me and it was written in an understandable way. I'm a (nearly) fulltime FreeBSD user, so some minor revisions came into my mind when I read the article. Here they are:

The mentioned command sequence

cd /usr/src/sys/amd64
cp GENERIC CUSTOM

won't work. The author writes "If you are on an x86 based machine, the kernel is located in the /usr/src/sys/i386 directory. [...] The kernel configuration file is located in a directory called conf." correctly, but misses to add the conf subdirectory to his commands. They should be:

# cd /usr/src/sys/amd64/conf
# cp GENERIC CUSTOM

For the AMD64 arch, /usr/src/sys/amd64/conf would be the correct path.

You can shorten the path, too, because there's a symlink /sys pointing at /usr/src/sys, so /sys/i386/conf is a valid cd parameter.

Side note: The author states that these procedures work fine with the 7.0-RELEASE kernel (stock kernel); be sure to build kernel and world if you updated your sources before, because kernel and world should be the same version (e. g. 7.0-RELEASE-p1).

If you want to read up some more about this topic, don't miss the high quality FreeBSD handbook: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/kernelconfig.html - the author mentions this source, too.

An interesting starting point, after all. I'm still thinking about writing a KLD module to read from a Sun type 5 keyboard attached to the serial port... say hello world to /dev/skbd0. :-) Fri, 23 May 2008 23:04:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Doc Pain) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?315499 http://osnews.com/thread?315499 excellent. now go write about newbus. Sat, 24 May 2008 08:59:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (primelight@live.com) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?315522 http://osnews.com/thread?315522 Nice! Code contains a syntax error though

switch event --> switch (event) Sat, 24 May 2008 15:33:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (hanne) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?315527 http://osnews.com/thread?315527 A great book to learn more about this topic is:

Designing BSD Rootkits
An Introduction to Kernel Hacking
by Joseph Kong

April 2007, 142 pp.
ISBN-10 1-59327-142-5
ISBN-13 978-1-59327-142-8

the only problem is that this book is based on FreeBSD 6.x Sat, 24 May 2008 16:46:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Espartano) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?315595 http://osnews.com/thread?315595 Why isn't there more articles like this?
An updated version of: The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System ?

Interesting readings are so few and far between nowadays .. in the internet times .. when interesting readings should abound ... it's such a shame given all the chances we have now and that other only dreamt of ... Mon, 26 May 2008 04:06:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (gnemmi) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?315599 http://osnews.com/thread?315599 A very good read!

I was wondering about the exact thing that the article mentioned (how to enable the ULE scheduler in FreeBSD 7.0). Really good to see this article which gives a good description of how to do that (and many thanks to Doc Pain for his revisions too).Edited 2008-05-26 07:33 UTC Mon, 26 May 2008 07:30:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (obsidian) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?315619 http://osnews.com/thread?315619 Precisely why lkm are turned off on my secure servers. Mon, 26 May 2008 14:53:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (libray) Comments