Valdis - I did not know the source had gotten THAT big, still, will be interesting to explore parts of it that interest me - the TCP stack for a start... Also, thanks for the advice on the book :)
Good point on the difficulty of mantaining my own distro - I realize I would need a fair few people behind me to keep it up to date. Network manager has one amusing flaw I noted on both Atheros and Broadcom chipsets - it randomly suspends the Wireless card, requiring several reboots to fix. I still have to figure it out, and it just annoys me in general. Hence, making my own version of it. Also, thanks for the advice on the mac80211, I was only familiar with MadWiFi as my netbook for wardriving ran an older Atheros card (Acer Aspire One from 2008). I will look into the mac80211 as soon as I can, the goal me and my friends have is to release a "modified" Ubuntu with our own network manager and some other Wireless auditing tools installed. Been done before I am sure, just we want to give our own spin on it. For both learning and for our own use. Regards, ~D. On Mon, Nov 21, 2011 at 1:02 PM, <[email protected]> wrote: > On Mon, 21 Nov 2011 12:24:03 GMT, Darren Martyn said: > > > 1) Read the latest kernels source over a long period of time, looking for > > bugs and to get a better understanding of how it works on that level > > Just keep in mind that you will never finish reading the kernel source, as > it's > currently sitting at somewhere near 14M lines of code, and every 3 month > release window has more new lines added than any one person can review. > Most of > the patches are posted ot the linux-kernel mailing list, which as a result > weighs in at around 450-600 pieces of mail every day. Enjoy drinking from > the > fire hose. > > That's why the current arrangement of subsystem maintainers exists. > > Doesn't mean that you can't review the important heavily used parts of the > kernel and learn something - that's probably only a quarter million lines > of > code, and things like the VFS code don't change as fast as the drivers and > architecture code. I would reccomend reading Linux Device Drivers, 3rd > Edition > (available online, just google for 'LDD3'). Note that the concepts still > apply, but due to the ever changing kernel API, sample code will probably > not > compile without some reworking. > > > 2) Build my own distro > > More of same - though Linux From Scratch will at least teach you how it > works. > But you'll go nuts trying to keep up to date on patches for all the > components of > a system big enough to use day-to-day. (Have fun reviewing the patches and > then building OpenOffice or Firefox from source every time upstream > releases > an update - and then there's all the code in xorg and Gnome/KDE, and....) > > > 3) Write my own network manager based off the LORCON/MadWiFi drivers > (using > > PyLORCON bindings) for the GNOME interface to replace the not-reliable > > "network manager" applet. > > This one is probably the most achievable, and NetworkManager *is* a total > piece of barely-usable crud. Do however keep in mind the following: > > 1) The MadWiFi drivers only work for Atheros chipsets, and a *lot* of boxes > have other wireless (lots of Intel chips out there, among other things). > > 2) MadWifi has been deprecated, and the wireless maintainer's advice is to > use > the ath5k and ath9k drivers instead. If those two drivers don't work for > your > Atheros, work with them to get the driver fixed - all the other Atheros > users > out there will thank you. > > 3) You *really* want your userspace to be using the mac80211 interfaces > instead, > so that they will work with non-Atheros cards as well. > > Good luck... > -- My Homepage :D <http://compsoc.nuigalway.ie/%7Einfodox>
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