Reddit reviews Designing BSD Rootkits: An Introduction to Kernel Hacking
We found 2 Reddit comments about Designing BSD Rootkits: An Introduction to Kernel Hacking. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
I can't recommend that book enough. It will give you a great overview over the services the kernel provides, design decisions and data structures.
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I'd recommend Gentoo for learning how Linux works. The great thing there is that by building the system from the ground up, you have to configure every tiny detail, and in doing so, you get to see every tiny detail. I gained a good deal of understanding from building it first for a server, then a desktop.
As for problems, yes can be plenty, especially if you plan on installing it on something with spotty support, like, in my example, a PowerPC Macintosh G4. I think that getting over these problems is a learning experience.
P.S. If it's low level kernel functionality you want to learn, I'd suggest installing FreeBSD (or a similar pure Unix project) and going from there. The reason is that the Unix kernel is not that terrifically different from the Linux kernel, and, being a more academic system, it tends to have more interesting books written about it. For instance, I'm reading Designing BSD Rootkits as an introduction to kernel hacking, and I'm applying many of the techniques to Linux as well as FreeBSD.
In addition ktrace beats the hell out of strace, but whatever...