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Writing a GEOM Class

<email>ivoras@FreeBSD.org</email>

<personname> <firstname>Ivan</firstname> <surname>Voras</surname> </personname> <affiliation> <_:address-1/> </affiliation>

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$FreeBSD: head/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/geom-class/article.xml 54291 2020-06-23 13:48:26Z emaste $

This text documents some starting points in developing GEOM classes, and kernel modules in general. It is assumed that the reader is familiar with C userland programming.

Introduction

Documentation

Documentation on kernel programming is scarce — it is one of few areas where there is nearly nothing in the way of friendly tutorials, and the phrase <quote>use the source!</quote> really holds true. However, there are some bits and pieces (some of them seriously outdated) floating around that should be studied before beginning to code:

The <link xlink:href="@@URL_RELPREFIX@@/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/developers-handbook/index.html">FreeBSD Developer's Handbook</link> — part of the documentation project, it does not contain anything specific to kernel programming, but rather some general useful information.

The <link xlink:href="@@URL_RELPREFIX@@/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/arch-handbook/index.html">FreeBSD Architecture Handbook</link> — also from the documentation project, contains descriptions of several low-level facilities and procedures. The most important chapter is 13, <link xlink:href="@@URL_RELPREFIX@@/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/arch-handbook/driverbasics.html">Writing FreeBSD device drivers</link>.

The Blueprints section of <link xlink:href="http://www.freebsddiary.org">FreeBSD Diary</link> web site — contains several interesting articles on kernel facilities.

The man pages in section 9 — for important documentation on kernel functions.

The <citerefentry><refentrytitle>geom</refentrytitle><manvolnum>4</manvolnum></citerefentry> man page and <link xlink:href="http://phk.freebsd.dk/pubs/">PHK's GEOM slides</link> — for general introduction of the GEOM subsystem.

Man pages <citerefentry><refentrytitle>g_bio</refentrytitle><manvolnum>9</manvolnum></citerefentry>, <citerefentry><refentrytitle>g_event</refentrytitle><manvolnum>9</manvolnum></citerefentry>, <citerefentry><refentrytitle>g_data</refentrytitle><manvolnum>9</manvolnum></citerefentry>, <citerefentry><refentrytitle>g_geom</refentrytitle><manvolnum>9</manvolnum></citerefentry>, <citerefentry><refentrytitle>g_provider</refentrytitle><manvolnum>9</manvolnum></citerefentry> <citerefentry><refentrytitle>g_consumer</refentrytitle><manvolnum>9</manvolnum></citerefentry>, <citerefentry><refentrytitle>g_access</refentrytitle><manvolnum>9</manvolnum></citerefentry> &amp; others linked from those, for documentation on specific functionalities.

The <citerefentry><refentrytitle>style</refentrytitle><manvolnum>9</manvolnum></citerefentry> man page — for documentation on the coding-style conventions which must be followed for any code which is to be committed to the FreeBSD tree.

Preliminaries

The best way to do kernel development is to have (at least) two separate computers. One of these would contain the development environment and sources, and the other would be used to test the newly written code by network-booting and network-mounting filesystems from the first one. This way if the new code contains bugs and crashes the machine, it will not mess up the sources (and other <quote>live</quote> data). The second system does not even require a proper display. Instead, it could be connected with a serial cable or KVM to the first one.