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

Shared memory


Unlike message queues, which offer a process-persistent messaging infrastructure, the shared memory service of IPC provides kernel-persistent memory that can be attached by an arbitrary number of processes that share common data. A shared memory infrastructure provides operation interfaces to allocate, attach, detach, and destroy shared memory regions. A process that needs access to shared data will attach or map a shared memory region into its address space; it can then access data in shared memory through the address returned by the mapping routine. This makes shared memory one of the fastest means of IPC since from a process's perspective it is akin to accessing local memory, which does not involve switch into kernel mode.

System V shared memory

Linux supports legacy SysV shared memory implementation under the IPC subsystem. Similar to SysV message queues, each shared memory region is identified by a unique IPC identifier.

Operation interfaces

The kernel provides distinct system...