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

Measuring scheduler latency via modern BPF tools

Without going into too many details, we'd be amiss to leave out the recent and powerful [e]BPF Linux kernel feature and it's associated frontends; there are a few to specifically measure scheduler and runqueue-related system latencies. (We covered the installation of the [e]BPF tools back in Chapter 1Kernel Workspace Setup under the Modern tracing and performance analysis with [e]BPF section).

The following table summarizes some of these tools (BPF frontends); all these tools need to be run as root (as with any BPF tool); they show their output as a histogram (with the time in microseconds by default):

BPF tool  What it measures
runqlat-bpfcc Time a task spends waiting on a runqueue for it's turn to run on the processor
runqslower-bpfcc (read as runqueue slower); time a task spends waiting on a runqueue for it's turn to run on the processor, showing only those threads that exceed a given threshold...