Understanding the Linux Kernel: The Linux Kernel Startup

(internals-for-interns.com)

78 points | by valyala 8 hours ago ago

18 comments

  • LPisGood 6 hours ago ago

    The AI image and immediate emoji bullet point really turn me off from investing in a 36 minute read from a blog started in late 2025.

    • gchamonlive 6 hours ago ago

      > That’s pretty much what the Linux kernel does at boot. The bootloader is the dropship. Your computer is the barren planet. The advance team is the execution of the startup code in the Linux kernel—the one we’ll be following the whole time. And by the end of this article, that advance team will literally have transformed itself into the standby maintenance crew while a brand-new civilian government takes over. Bear with me—it’ll make sense as we go.

      Seems pretty good so far, but the article writes itself in the intro to be very basic, which is a good thing for me, never looked at how the Linux kernel actually boots, so I have only the basic understanding from college.

      • TacticalCoder 5 hours ago ago

        > Seems pretty good so far, ...

        I'm not sure about "good".

        These horrible analogies though scream AI-generated content. LinkedIn is full of such crap: AI apparently atm loves to sprinking short sentences of the form: "The X is the Y. The A is the B." or "It's not C. It's D". when making analogies.

        Everything has to be a "pattern": things cannot be described on their own. There needs to be a connection to something else for it to explain something: we're talking computers? We must somehow cram in the similitude with a four-strokes combustion engine.

        I mean: how is fine-tuning a program or some heuristics not the same as a variable valve-timing motor engine feature?

        "It's not fixed valve-timing we're dealing with. It's a variocam!".

        If you ask me I find it really tiring already.

        • gchamonlive 4 hours ago ago

          You should be reading a more formal document, seems to me you are just not the target audience. You disliking the analogies and getting tired at it for not getting to the point doesn't necessarily mean the text is bad, because that's too much of a narrow view in which to criticise a text that is clearly almost a social communication piece of sorts.

    • landdate 5 hours ago ago

      I must not be that keyed in to AI because I didn't notice. Thankfully I checked the comments before I got too far into the post.

    • john_strinlai 6 hours ago ago

      i see one whole emoji on the entire page

      • LPisGood 6 hours ago ago

        You’re right, but it’s immediately right up top next to the em dashes.

        • john_strinlai 6 hours ago ago

          there is a certain irony in not being able to spend 5 seconds to verify your complaint, when your complaint is presumably about the author's lack of effort.

          • LPisGood 5 hours ago ago

            I’m not sure what you mean. I saw the emoji bullet point, the em dashes, the date of the first post, and scrolled to a random paragraph; that’s plenty of verification.

      • undefined 6 hours ago ago
        [deleted]
    • cube00 6 hours ago ago

      [dead]

  • oncallthrow 5 hours ago ago

    I came, I saw the em dash, I closed the tab

    • tcp_handshaker 3 hours ago ago

      No no you are not looking at this correctly :-) This AI slop, on which I was able to quickly find four mistakes...

      Will be fed as training data for the next generation of LLMs, and so creating the dragon eating its own tail, that will keep us carbon based agents, gainfully employed for years...

  • jammcq 6 hours ago ago

    I'm really enjoying this article. Many years ago when I created LTSP I had to dive in and understand how the whole bzImage and initrd worked so we could fetch a kernel with tftp and mount a root filesystem via NFS. It's been years since I've played with this stuff but it's still very interesting to me. Thank you!

  • whattheheckheck 4 hours ago ago

    Is this the future? Trillion dollar companies suck up all content from the internet and published media they can get their hands on and then we all pay them to pull out what we all individually scooped up into chunks from experience and republish it as potentially repetitive and non authoritative source material?

    I guess there's a bit of signal in there, another person thought this nugget of symbols is worth paying attention to

    • nainachirps_ 2 hours ago ago

      Can you recommend og human crafted resource with similar topic?

  • undefined 6 hours ago ago
    [deleted]
  • SilentM68 4 hours ago ago

    Very interesting :)