Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!sri-unix!quintus!sun!pitstop!sundc!seismo!uunet!mcvax!unido!tub!cabo From: cabo@tub.UUCP (Carsten Bormann) Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards Subject: Re: man section for kernel functions? Summary: Let's do it. Keywords: kernel man pages Message-ID: <335@tub.UUCP> Date: 19 Jan 88 13:12:20 GMT References: <5174@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu> Reply-To: cabo@tub.UUCP (Carsten Bormann) Organization: Technical University of Berlin, Germany Lines: 41 Posted: Tue Jan 19 14:12:20 1988 In article <5174@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu> mangler@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu (Don Speck) writes: () There are manual page sections for almost everything... why are () there none for kernel functions such as sleep, wakeup, physio, () splx, ubasetup, getblk, getc, timeout and all the others that () are called from drivers? It would make it a lot easier to () write drivers... Because people who still need a manual entry for sleep() and wakeup() are not supposed to muck around with the kernel :-) Seriously, I think that it's about time to make the interface from a driver to the kernel a first-class citizen among the other documented interfaces (system-call interface, command interface, file formats, etc.). I think nobody has done it yet because: 1) In the early times you had the kernel sources (and there was the Lions commentary in a box on the wall behind glass with a hammer beside it). 2) Then we had the times when everybody was paranoid not to leak out details of the UNIX system to the general public (ranging from Whitesmiths putfmt() replacement for printf() to avoid infringing copyrights to the sorry state of the internals documentation you at least get at all with systems like Xenix). 3) Now we are in the ``post-Bach era'', i.e. a good high-level description of the kernel workings is readily available (for System V derivatives at least). While Bach published this book with permission from AT&T, other authors still are in a too intimidated state to write similar lower-level books about driver hacking. As BSD has always been the leading* UNIX variant available to the masses, maybe someone should write a new manual section about kernel functions in 4.4BSD? Then I might have a chance to finally understand ubarelse() and interface driver hacking. And some day, System V release 47.11 will pick up the idea. _____ * from a research point of view, of course. -- Carsten Bormann, Communications and Operating Systems Research Group Technical University of Berlin (West, of course...) Path: ...!pyramid!tub!cabo from the world, ...!unido!tub!cabo from Europe only.