20120602

FreeBSD Driver book

I recently received a complementary copy of the book FreeBSD Device Drivers by Josheph Kong. I also had the pleasure of meeting Josheph Kong at BSDcan 2012 a few weeks ago.
This book serves as a good introduction to all kinds of drivers and kernel modules in FreeBSD. It explores the basics of each kind of driver, complete with an example driver from the FreeBSD tree for each of the types of drivers that it describes. Joseph annotates the code to explain what each part of the code examples do, as well as to highlight the relevant areas for people wishing to write their own driver.
I'd recommend the book for anybody that needs an introduction to drivers. The walk throughs will get people up to speed, as well as introduce many of the uniquely FreeBSD quirks one needs to know to integrate with FreeBSD. The explanations are clear and concise and provide good coverage of the material.
Advanced developers will find some good nuggets in the book as well. Many of the explanations go into enough detail that even advanced users will learn things about FreeBSD from the book. Since the book sticks to the simple topics, some advanced users may be disappointed to find that some advanced topics have been omitted from this book. While many of them are very esoteric, the one I would have included would have been a discussion about how network drivers interact with struct ifnet. While other books cover that in detail for a generic BSD system, having that covered in this book would have been very beneficial. A companion book covering these topics would nicely fill the gaps here, should No Starch Press decide to publish it.
The FreeBSD world has been without any good device driver book in English for a long, long time. This book is a welcome addition. I hope it is but the first book of many from Joseph in this area.

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