Book Image

Linux Kernel Programming

By : Kaiwan N. Billimoria
Book Image

Linux Kernel Programming

By: Kaiwan N. Billimoria

Overview of this book

Linux Kernel Programming is a comprehensive introduction for those new to Linux kernel and module development. This easy-to-follow guide will have you up and running with writing kernel code in next-to-no time. This book uses the latest 5.4 Long-Term Support (LTS) Linux kernel, which will be maintained from November 2019 through to December 2025. By working with the 5.4 LTS kernel throughout the book, you can be confident that your knowledge will continue to be valid for years to come. You’ll start the journey by learning how to build the kernel from the source. Next, you’ll write your first kernel module using the powerful Loadable Kernel Module (LKM) framework. The following chapters will cover key kernel internals topics including Linux kernel architecture, memory management, and CPU scheduling. During the course of this book, you’ll delve into the fairly complex topic of concurrency within the kernel, understand the issues it can cause, and learn how they can be addressed with various locking technologies (mutexes, spinlocks, atomic, and refcount operators). You’ll also benefit from more advanced material on cache effects, a primer on lock-free techniques within the kernel, deadlock avoidance (with lockdep), and kernel lock debugging techniques. By the end of this kernel book, you’ll have a detailed understanding of the fundamentals of writing Linux kernel module code for real-world projects and products.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Section 1: The Basics
6
Writing Your First Kernel Module - LKMs Part 2
7
Section 2: Understanding and Working with the Kernel
10
Kernel Memory Allocation for Module Authors - Part 1
11
Kernel Memory Allocation for Module Authors - Part 2
14
Section 3: Delving Deeper
17
About Packt

Slab layer implementations within the kernel

In closing, we mention the fact that there are at least three different mutually exclusive kernel-level implementations of the slab allocator; only one of them can be in use at runtime. The one to be used at runtime is selected at the time of configuring the kernel (you learned this procedure in detail in Chapter 2Building the 5.x Linux Kernel from Source – Part 1). The relevant kernel configuration options are as follows:

  • CONFIG_SLAB
  • CONFIG_SLUB
  • CONFIG_SLOB

The first (SLAB) is the early, well-supported (but quite under-optimized) one; the second one (SLUB, the unqueued allocator) is a major improvement on the first, in terms of memory efficiency, performance, and better diagnostics, and is the one selected by default. The SLOB allocator is a drastic simplification and, as per the kernel config help, "does not perform well on large systems."