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

Iterating over the task list III – the code

Now let's see the (relevant) code of our thrd_showall kernel module:

// ch6/foreach/thrd_showall/thrd_showall.c */
[...]
#include <linux/sched.h> /* current */
#include <linux/version.h>
#if LINUX_VERSION_CODE > KERNEL_VERSION(4, 10, 0)
#include <linux/sched/signal.h>
#endif
[...]

static int showthrds(void)
{
struct task_struct *g, *t; // 'g' : process ptr; 't': thread ptr
[...]
#if 0
/* the tasklist_lock reader-writer spinlock for the task list 'should'
* be used here, but, it's not exported, hence unavailable to our
* kernel module */
read_lock(&tasklist_lock);
#endif
disp_idle_thread();

A few points to note regarding the preceding code:

  • We use the LINUX_VERSION_CODE() macro to conditionally include a header, as required.
  • Please ignore the locking work for now – usage (or the lack thereof) of the tasklist_lock() ...