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

Custom slab – a demo kernel module

Time to get our hands dirty with some code! Let's look at a simple demonstration of using the preceding APIs to create our very own custom slab cache. As usual, we show only relevant code here. I urge you to clone the book's GitHub repository and try it out yourself! You can find the code for this file at ch9/slab_custom/slab_custom.c.

In our init code path, we first call the following function to create our custom slab cache:

// ch9/slab_custom/slab_custom.c
#define OURCACHENAME "our_ctx"
/* Our 'demo' structure, that (we imagine) is often allocated and freed;
* hence, we create a custom slab cache to hold pre-allocated 'instances'
* of it... Its size: 328 bytes.
*/
struct myctx {
u32 iarr[10];
u64 uarr[10];
char uname[128], passwd[16], config[64];
};
static struct kmem_cache *gctx_cachep;

In the preceding code, we declare a (global) pointer (gctx_cachep) to the to-be-created custom slab cache...