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

The kmalloc() and vmalloc() APIs – a quick comparison

A quick comparison between the kmalloc() (or kzalloc()and vmalloc() (or vzalloc()) APIs is presented in the following table:

Characteristic kmalloc() or kzalloc() vmalloc() or vzalloc()
Memory allocated is  Physically contiguous Virtually (logically) contiguous
Memory alignment Aligned to hardware (CPU) cacheline Page-aligned
Minimum granularity Arch-dependent; as low as 8 bytes on x86[_64] 1 page
Performance Much faster (physical RAM allocated) for small memory allocations (the typical case); ideal for allocations < 1 page Slower, demand-paged (only virtual memory allocated; lazy allocation of RAM involving the page fault handler); can service large (virtual) allocations
Size limitation Limited (to typically 4 MB) Very large (the kernel vmalloc region can even be several terabytes on 64-bit systems, though much less on 32-bit)
Suitability Suitable for almost all use cases where performance...