How to get started hacking NetBSD - Taylor R Campbell - EuroBSDcon 2023

Taylor R Campbell: How to get started hacking NetBSD
You've used a BSD, but have you used the open source of it to bend it to your will? Does it grant you freedom, or just confine you to a different set of bugs?
This talk will tell the story of how I got into hacking NetBSD with zero experience in kernel development, and how you can get started with things too even if you aren't an experienced kernel hacker, including:
making cross-builds a breeze to do work from any platform,
diving into the kernel,
how to read a device driver,
working on a single subsystem at a time,
iterating development with automatic tests, chroots, rump, and VMs.
For beginners and experienced C hackers alike!
Taylor R Campbell:
Taylor ‘Riastradh’ Campbell has been a NetBSD developer since 2011, working on various areas including device drivers and multiprocessor safety, and is a member of the NetBSD core team and The NetBSD Foundation board.

[@eulondon]

Very cool and informative talk. We need more talks like these to create a new generation of developers.

[@chidaruma_]

This is really cool, I'll be setting up a VM to try all of this. I always wanted a talk like this one. Thanks.

[@jbglaw]

VAX has done great progress during recent time, we're back on track!

[@xealit]

"device registers are kind of like locations in memory" the point is that they are _meaningful_ locations in memory, not just bytes to store some software state. So, it is not like an _array_ of ints, it is more like a _struct_ of ints with meaningful names. What's worse, often the meaningful part is the _bitfields_ inside the registers, not the registers themselves. C does not have a nice language semantics to support that.

[@xravenx24fe]

The semantics C has are perfectly functional for the task but yeah, not easily human reasonable and needs to be thoroughly tested for sure.

[@FELDCORP]

uuuuhh muuuu uhhhh mmmmyuuhhh NETBSD nyyuuuuh package source ahhh nuuuuuhhhh this is actually exciting aaaaahhh ummmmmm and NETBSD local socket mmmm ummm uhhh imap client TLS