We generally encourage those who want to learn how to develop to do so by developing code rather than using kitchens. However, everyone gets started differently. This means that some aspiring developers may want to get their feet wet with something simple, like a ROM kitchen, before actually creating real development work. And much of the same goes for those looking to start learning more about kernels.

It is with this in mind that XDA Recognized Contributor championswimmer has released a kitchen aimed at modifying kernels. With the motivation behind the project stemming from XDA Recognized Developer and Retired Senior Moderator dsixda's now-legendary ROM kitchen, championswimmer wants to create a similar kitchen for kernels to help new users get started making minor modifications.

The kitchen mainly enables users to extract the zImage and ramdisk from a boot.img file, combine a Zimage and ramdisk into a boot.img file, and modify the boot splash screen. As described by the developer:

Fully menu driven interface (like dsixda kitchen)

Extract zImage and ramdisk from boot.img file

Create boot.img from zImage and ramdisk

Extract zImage and ramdisk from any ftf file that contains kernel.sin (Xperia 2010, 2011, 2012)

Create flashable ftf from zImage and ramdisk (Xperia 2010 only)

Create compressed ramdisk binary from ramdisk folder

Extract ramdisk files from ramdisk binary

Convert png image to rle format (used in android boot splash images)

Convert rle boot splash to png file (so that you can edit it)

As with dsixda's kitchen, this kitchen is a menu-driven script meant to run on Linux.With this kitchen, beginner kernel devs can make a number of small tweaks to the various parts of the kernel.

However, championswimmer makes sure to caution new users:

i would add here that... we should not use it a a huge complicated machine into which we throw in a bootimg and get back a boot.img

i really realy want wannabe kernel devs to go through the internals too... see the scripts, read the source files and try to understand what goes inside the kitchen and not merely use it as a 'closed-box-machine'

Those looking to learn more should head over to the original thread.