Week 6

This week I have been attempting to work with and alter the linux kernel. After some difficulties recompiling and installing the kernel, I found a guide from a University of Kentucky OS class which allowed me to install my new kernel. After this, I was able to add code to log the random data to the linux syslog file through the printk function. While this was successful, the goal is to write the data to a normal file.

Information on writing to files from within the linux kernel is difficult to find since it is considered something never to be done in kernel code. However, since I am not writing code for contribution to the kernel distribution, it is still something I want to pursue. I was able to find several different ways to do this, and have tried all of them. However, each one has caused the kernel to hang on boot. I am attempting to debug the problems, but it is very time consuming since each attempt requires me to recompile the kernel. This process generally takes about 10-15 minutes.

I will continue to debug this problem in the coming week. Once this is solved, I just need to modify the code so it can tell which random event occurred, and to use this to write to a different file for each event.