This month's blueprint is about watchdog timers. A watchdog timer is a small bit of hardware which will reset the machine if your operating system or program fails to pay attention to it before the timer loses its patience.

FreeBSD Kernel Blueprints: Userland/kernel interfaces (Kamp, Poul-Henning) 200308

Having survived my first article with no ill effects (actually I did chip a tooth right after it came out, but I haven't been able to prove the connection), this months installment will pick up where the previous one ended, and take a peek at configuration interfaces for complex and extensible kernel features.

FreeBSD Kernel Blueprints: Userland/kernel interfaces (Kamp, Poul-Henning) 200305

Back when Daemon News started, a couple of us came up with the idea of a series of "blueprint" articles, intended to shine some light on the actual construction details of the kernel. This is my attempt to make good on that idea. This first article is a tour of userland/kernel interfaces: what happens whenever a userland program requests services from the kernel.

Blueprints: OpenBSD Loadable Kernel Modules (Werner, Peter) 200109

Loadable kernel modules allow the system administrator to dynamically add and remove functionality from a running system. This ability also helps software developers to develop new parts of the kernel without constantly rebooting to test their changes. A caveat of loadable modules is the security risk they present. They open a wide range of possibilities to a malicious superuser and can be very hard to detect.

Blueprints: Dynamic Kernel Linker (KLD) Facility Programming Tutorial [Intro] (Reiter, Andrew) 200010

This month's Blueprints article introduces the basics of programming and developing KLD's under the FreeBSD operating system. Using the "learn by example" method, I share skeleton code so that you may be able to learn what makes up KLD code at the most simplistic level.

BluePrints: An In-depth Study of NetBSD Bootstrapping and a Few Speedy Enhanceme (Zhou, Chen)(Ramesh, Raghav) 200009

"The motivation for this project is two-fold: one, to gain a detailed understanding of the low-level bootstrap process; two, to exploit areas of performance improvement."

Blueprints: Writing an ISA device driver (Babkin, Sergey) 200008

This document may be considered as a chapter from an imaginary Device Driver Writer's Guide. It concentrates on the issues relevant to writing a driver for an ISA device.

Blueprints: How to Write Kernel Drivers with NewBus (Langer, Alexander) 200007

I'd like to cover how one actually WRITES a newbus driver. When I started with this thing, I didn't know where to start, and so I read many lines of the source code of other drivers and found out over time...

Blueprints: Writing a CAM SCSI controller driver (Babkin, Sergey) 200006

This month's Blueprint gives an in-depth tutorial on SCSI driver creation.

Blueprints: RAIDFrame from Simulation to Practice (Oster, Greg) 200005

The RAIDFrame software RAID system

Blueprints: All About Netgraph (Cobbs, Archie) 200003

Netgraph is an in-kernel networking subsystem that follows the UNIX principle of achieving power and flexibility through combinations of simple tools, each of which is designed to perform a single, well defined task.

Blueprints: Software RAID for BSD: Vinum (Lehey, Greg) 200002

Many BSD systems have storage needs which current generation disks can't fulfill by themselves: they may want more storage, more performance or more reliability than an individual disk can provide...

Blueprints: Design Elements of the FreeBSD VM System (Dillon, Matt) 200001

In this first article in the new Blueprints column, Matt Dillon gives us an overview of FreeBSD\\\'s VM system. Blueprints features in-depth information on BSD subsystems, presented by the authors or major developers. Matt has recently done some major work on the VM system, including a complete rewrite of the swap mechanism.