Very nice and educational.

It’s a program certainly, but “just a program” is a bit misleading because it places it on the same footing as Doom or cat or an Arduino project. Linux is a ring 0 program, which processors give unique treatment.

Zaphod’s just zis guy, you know?

Well, the kernel is not “just a program” in that it is not like the other programs on your system. If it was, you would “just” run it in your shell. The kernel cannot run this way of course because it is not a user mode program.

That said, if course the kernel is a program in the sense that it is a set of machine instructions that make the hardware do what you want.

And the kernel is designed to talk to hardware and other programs—to be the bridge between the two. It is not something an end-user interacts with directly.

On my arch install, all I have is vmlinuz-linux under /boot. How come there's no further information appended like in the article?

Yeah it's just as simple as the calculator program I copy pasted in highschool computer class.

Thank you, this is a great explanation. I look forward to the rest of this series.

Edit: I successfully booted a Debian kernel using this tutorial, though I wrote the init program in C++ instead of Go. The process is pretty much the same, but you have to add the -static flag to g++ since the C runtime is not included in the initramfs. This might be obvious to more seasoned programmers but it took me a minute to figure it out.

It's a very good explanation. I like that it is short and hands on. For me, it is pitched at the right level and the practical style keeps it very grounded.

what you’d add or change for future posts in the series

I wouldn't change anything to do with the content! Speaking personally, I'm a fan of full text RSS feeds, so I'd love one on this blog if that's an option :)

This is very cool, thanks for sharing!

I did a similar exercise a decade ago with HTTP and it was fun and eye-opening.

Nice article. Waiting for the upcoming parts.

Blinry did something similar not to lomg ago, maybe it's interesting for you, too: https://blinry.org/tiny-linux/

This looks really interesting. I’ll have a look when I get home.

That looks simple when someone (you) say it simply.

Thank you for that. 😌

This sounds awesome. I'm going to read this tomorrow when I can give it my full attention.

That's so cool! Thanks for sharing it!

OK, yeah, that's actually really helpful. Anyone who plays around with Linux at all, give this a read. Good stuff.

When you read the article the headline starts to make sense. I wouldn't have read it based on the headline. Thankfully you read it nevertheless and praised it. :)

So which is the part where I add Hannah Montana? Jokes aside, very interesting and easy to read.

Says "kernel runs just like any other program" and proceeds to launch a VM to run it, because it would "mess up the system" otherwise. I liked the article, but it feels like it's leaving out the critical piece.

I really enjoyed both parts of the article. Thanks for sharing!