newbie question

[Rodney W. Grimes]

> On Wednesday, 22 May 2019 at  1:36:24 +0300, Alexandru Goia wrote:
> > greetings. how can do i get attuned in a logical manner with the
> > *bsd/freebsd kernel source code ? thank you very much !
> 
> Clearly you know how to get it (otherwise
> https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/ is your
> friend).  To understand it better, I'd suggest reading "The Design and
> Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System" by Kirk McKusick and
> George Neville-Neil (Addison-Wesley).
> 
> Understanding the code requires some work.  People will happily answer
> detail questions, but you'll be responsible for finding out the
> overall structure yourself.

During a somewhat recent session of working with a not new,
but also not seasoned developer, they noted a great deal of
confusion when I was reading through and explaining code
to them when I would actually read "pcb" on screen as
"Process Control Block" when verbalizing it.  They could not
see what I had just read to them.

After a short discussion we realized that my mind was auto translating
the short and cryptic variable names into the full and proper names.
This became key in my understanding of how all these bits work
long long ago and has just become automatic.  SO, I encorage you and
others new to the code, learn these data structure names, and mentall
process them by long name, it could help you to better understand
what it is your reading.

The BSD sources are very consistent in its use of names and objects,
and abbriviates, taking that to your advantage!

Anyone any place have a nice list of the TLA to full name?
pcb
tcb
p
tp
ifa
...

> Greg
-- 
Rod Grimes                                                 rgrimes at freebsd.org