Welcome

Useful information regarding my YouTube channel

Here you can find the following

• Many of the PoC projects I wrote in my videos (notice that they are only for fun and are NOT suitable for production)
• Information about my setup
• Suggested learning resources
• Vim programming navigation tips
• Common questions
• My .vimrc file

Setup

• On my main laptop (on which I record the videos) I use Windows 10 and Debian Linux using WSL
• On my small on the go laptop I use OpenBSD
• At work I use MacOS

On Windows I use LightWM which is an open source tiling window manager I am working on.

Tools I like using on Windows

• Vim (winget install vim)
• QEMU (winget install qemu)
• Windbg (winget install Microsoft.WinDbg)
• Cutter (winget install Rizin.Cutter)
• Sysinternals (winget install "Sysinternals Suite")
• VirtualBox (winget install Oracle.VirtualBox)

Setting up WSL Debian on Windows

wsl --install Debian

You can access the Windows C drive from WSL as /mnt/c

Basic Windows Programming Setup

• Visual Studio Build Tools
• Windows SDK

Tools I like using on Linux

• QEMU (apt install qemu-system-x86)
• GCC (apt install gcc)

Basic Linux Programming Setup

apt install gcc manpage-dev vim git make

Basic Linux Kernel Programming Setup

apt install bzip2 libncurses-dev flex bison bc cpio libelf-dev libssl-dev syslinux dosfstools

I also like using QEMU to try out the built kernel: apt install qemu-system-x86

Grabbing the Linux Kernel source

You can grab it from torvalds mirror on Github https://github.com/torvalds/linux or from the Linux kernel website https://kernel.org

When cloning the kernel, I recommend using the depth flag like so git clone --depth 1 so it will not bring over the entire history of the kernel, but only the last commit (this will speed up the cloning process and save disk space)

I highly recommend checking out the Linux kernel documentation https://docs.kernel.org/, you can also build it locally on your computer by following the instructions in the kernel source code README.

Suggested Learning Resources

Unix

• The book "UNIX: A History and a Memoir" by Brian W. Kernighan - Really enjoyed reading this one, I am generally a fan of history related to computers, and this book tells very well how the early days of Unix were and how things came to be what they are today
• The lecture "A Narrative History of BSD" by Dr. Kirk McKusick - Very interesting lecture, you can find online
• GDB - This tool comes in very handy when you want to dive in deeper, and also in general to debug the programs you write. It has a great help system, check out the help and apropos commands.
• The man pages and info pages - Many of the documentation of Unix like systems can be found in the man pages using the man command, this includes docs about commands, system calls and more. GNU utilities like GDB for example tend to have more extensive documentation in the info pages which can be accessed through the info command.

Linux

• Linux Docs - Great source of information to learn about all things Linux, goes from Admin related stuff like configuring kernel command-line parameters and until low level subsystems in the kernel. I would recommend reading the docs in conjunction with reading the source code
• Robert Landley's talk about making a minimal Linux system (you can find on Youtube)
• Playlist on YouTube: "Greybeard Qualification - Linux Internals" - nice and helpful videos about Linux internals, they are somewhat dated, but still contain a lot of information that is relavent today
• The book "Understanding the Linux Kernel", great companion for researching the kernel, it is quite dated so beware of some outdated information, but still valuable since a lot of the basic core mechanisms and archictecture is still relavent for today

Windows

• The book "Inside Windows NT" by Helen Custer - This book was written in conjunction with the preperation of the release of the first version of Windows NT in 1993, though this book is old and contains a lot of outdated information, I found it very interesting and fun to read to understand how things came to be how they are today on Windows. Also since the basic architecture of the Windows NT kernel has pretty much remained the same as it was designed in the original Windows NT, I did get a much better understanding of internals after reading this book. I have also recently started reading "Windows Internals" which is the modern version of "Inside Window NT" but I will say that "Windows Internals" is much more technical and harder to read as compared to "Inside Windows NT" which is more focused on the high level and general design of Windows.
• The books of "Windows Internals" (part 1 and part 2) - Very interesting books about how Windows works under the hood, they include great practical exercises to demonstrate the theory discussed in the chapters.
• SysInternals - Great tools for learning what happens under the hood on Windows.
• Win32 API - The Offical Windows API Documentation
• WinDbg - The Windows Debugger, it comes with a great help system built-in which can be opened using the command .hh
• "Windows Debugging and Troubleshooting" lecture (you can find on YT) - Great lecture with cool WinDbg tricks
• "Kernel_Debugging_Tutorial.doc" - a great WinDbg kernel debugging guide that comes with Windows SDK
• The Old New Thing - a great blog written by Raymond Chen with all kinds of interesting stories about Windows
• Leaked Windows XP Source Code - you can find here on Github by searching "nt5src" someone uploaded the leaked archive, this is leaked so use common sense on how to use it (for example I wouldn't go ahead and copy parts of this code to other projects), but it's definetly an interesting source of information for research purposes
• ReactOS - this is an interesting open source project that is attempting to clone Windows
• Lectures/Videos by Mark Russinovich - you can find them on YouTube, very interesting source of information about Windows internals

C Programming

• The book "Writing Solid Code" by Steve Maguire - I read the original book but I think there is a newer edition, I enjoyed reading this one a lot, it is also quite old and contains some outdated info but still talks about a lot of tips which are relevant until today when programming C.

Assembly

• Intel SDM - The official Intel references for x86/x64 architectures, you can use them to find for example documentation for specific instructions.

Computer History

• The Computer Chronicles - A great show that was broadcast from the 80s until the early 2000s and is a great time capsule of many major events that happened in the world of computing, very interesting and all the episodes are available to watch free online.

How I Navigate Source Code with Vim

The following tips come along side my playlist "Vim Tips" on my channel, some of the following tips are covered in those videos.

Regarding the ctags program, I use "Universal Ctags". I would recommend making sure you don't use a version of ctags that is too outdated, you can check by running ctags --help

• I always like setting the working directory to my current project: cd ~/cloned/project
• Configure Vim to use git grep as the :grep engine, this is extremely handy to quickly search text across a Git repository while in Vim, the search results come up directly inside Vim. I have a video about setting this up, or you can checkout the set gp line in my .vimrc
• Tags: I have a video summarizing this on my playlist, but tags are very handy for navigating code quickly and efficiently. To make life easier I would recommend making a script in your project like build_tags for example and inserting over there the ctags generation command with all the paths, then you can configure a mapping in your vimrc to run the script when pressing F11 for example
• Double star: When you only remember part of a file name for example and you want to recursively list matches, you can utilize the double star wildcard for example: :e web/**/*page.js and the press TAB will expand with all the options, checkout the set wildmenu and the wildoptions parts from my vimrc for a nicer expansion menu.
• Goto first occurence: The [I (opening square bracket and capital I) command is very handy for finding the first occurence of a certain word on the current file. It can even interpret the #include and search the first occurence also in the included header files.
• The path option (:help path): Very useful for telling Vim about directories to search for when use a bunch of commands related to opening different files (like the [I command above)
• The built-in file explorer plugin (netrw): Handy when you want to visually navigate, you can start it on a certain path just by running :e src/plugins for example.
• The built-in autocomplete: CTRL+N for general auto complete and the CTRL+X following a type of completion (for instance CTRL+X and then [ for completion based on tags or CTRL+X and then f for completion based on files, and much more in the Vim help).

Common Questions

• Why I prefer using Windows over a Linux Distro as my main desktop OS? There are a couple of reasons:

  • I find it more comfortable
  • I like the fact that it has wide support for old/new software and games
  • I am interested in both Windows programming and Linux programming

• Why I prefer using Vim over other IDEs/Editors

  • I have some videos about this topic but to summarize:
    • Vim contains way more advanced, useful and awesome features than other IDEs and Editors and also exposes those features in a much more harmonic way as compared to IDEs which map advanced features to awkward keyboard chords. On my playlist "Vim Tips" I talk about some of those features I like and a lot of them cannot be found in other IDEs/Editors.

• Why I prefer using the command line build tools over graphical IDE buttons for building code

  • I prefer compiling and building in the command line instead of through IDE buttons since it lets me see and control exactly what is going on without the IDE abstractions, and it encourages me to understand how the compilation and linking works more deeply.