Prequel: The Foundation

Cultivation Stage: Mortal Foundation Building Kernel Focus: C language (the kernel dialect), assembly language, and low-level fundamentals

Opening Words

The Great Dao has no form, yet it gives birth to heaven and earth. At the beginning of all things, the foundation comes first.

If a kernel cultivator cannot understand the mysteries of C, or grasp the fine grain of assembly, he is no different from a mortal holding a sword: the blade may be sharp, but an unsteady hand makes it useless.

This volume does not tell a story.

It explains principles.

But principles themselves can be the best kind of story.

Chapters in This Volume

Chapter	Title	Core Topic
Origin	The Dao Gives Birth to One	The seven foundations, and a consciousness in the chaos
1	The Dao of Pointers	Pointers, arrays, memory layout, stack and heap
2	The Art of Structures	Structure alignment, bit fields, , linked lists
3	Compiler Secret Arts	GCC extensions: , ,
4	Registers and Instructions	RISC-V 64 assembly basics, registers, common instructions
5	Inline Assembly	syntax, constraints, and the fusion of C and assembly
6	Bit Operations and Atomics	Bit operations, CAS, , spinlock basics
7	Barriers and Impermanence	, memory barriers, compiler barriers, out-of-order execution
8	The Dao of the Preprocessor	#define, conditional compilation, variadic macros, token pasting
9	Memory Layout	Virtual address space, stack and heap, kernel address space
10	The Dao of ELF	ELF format, segments and sections, symbol tables, relocation
Final	Foundation Unified	Ten foundations become one, and the road begins

Why Read the Prequel

Kernel code is not ordinary C code. It is full of:

• Invisible GCC extensions (__attribute__((packed)), , )
• Assembly embedded inside C (asm volatile, system calls)
• Techniques ordinary programmers almost never use (, , bit-field operations)
• Precise control over hardware behavior (memory barriers, atomic operations, cache-line alignment)

These are the "spiritual energy" of the kernel world. Without them, reading kernel source is like reading a heavenly scripture with mortal eyes.

Kernel Sources Covered

• - basic type definitions
• - compiler macros and extensions
• - kernel linked lists
• - the macro
• - memory barriers
• arch/riscv/include/asm/ - RISC-V architecture-specific assembly