Book Image

Mastering Linux Kernel Development

By : CH Raghav Maruthi
Book Image

Mastering Linux Kernel Development

By: CH Raghav Maruthi

Overview of this book

Mastering Linux Kernel Development looks at the Linux kernel, its internal arrangement and design, and various core subsystems, helping you to gain significant understanding of this open source marvel. You will look at how the Linux kernel, which possesses a kind of collective intelligence thanks to its scores of contributors, remains so elegant owing to its great design. This book also looks at all the key kernel code, core data structures, functions, and macros, giving you a comprehensive foundation of the implementation details of the kernel’s core services and mechanisms. You will also look at the Linux kernel as well-designed software, which gives us insights into software design in general that are easily scalable yet fundamentally strong and safe. By the end of this book, you will have considerable understanding of and appreciation for the Linux kernel.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Index

Chapter 8. Kernel Synchronization and Locking

Kernel address space is shared by all user-mode processes, which enables concurrent access to kernel services and data structures. For reliable functioning of the system, it is imperative that kernel services be implemented to be re-entrant. Kernel code paths accessing global data structures need to be synchronized to ensure consistency and validity of shared data. In this chapter, we will get into details of various resources at the disposal of kernel programmers for synchronization of kernel code paths and protection of shared data from concurrent access.

This chapter will cover the following topics:

  • Atomic operations
  • Spinlocks
  • Standard mutexes
  • Wait/wound mutex
  • Semaphores
  • Sequence locks
  • Completions