Book Image

Linux Kernel Programming Part 2 - Char Device Drivers and Kernel Synchronization

By : Kaiwan N. Billimoria
Book Image

Linux Kernel Programming Part 2 - Char Device Drivers and Kernel Synchronization

By: Kaiwan N. Billimoria

Overview of this book

Linux Kernel Programming Part 2 - Char Device Drivers and Kernel Synchronization is an ideal companion guide to the Linux Kernel Programming book. This book provides a comprehensive introduction for those new to Linux device driver development and will have you up and running with writing misc class character device driver code (on the 5.4 LTS Linux kernel) in next to no time. You'll begin by learning how to write a simple and complete misc class character driver before interfacing your driver with user-mode processes via procfs, sysfs, debugfs, netlink sockets, and ioctl. You'll then find out how to work with hardware I/O memory. The book covers working with hardware interrupts in depth and helps you understand interrupt request (IRQ) allocation, threaded IRQ handlers, tasklets, and softirqs. You'll also explore the practical usage of useful kernel mechanisms, setting up delays, timers, kernel threads, and workqueues. Finally, you'll discover how to deal with the complexity of kernel synchronization with locking technologies (mutexes, spinlocks, and atomic/refcount operators), including more advanced topics such as cache effects, a primer on lock-free techniques, deadlock avoidance (with lockdep), and kernel lock debugging techniques. By the end of this Linux kernel book, you'll have learned the fundamentals of writing Linux character device driver code for real-world projects and products.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)
1
Section 1: Character Device Driver Basics
3
User-Kernel Communication Pathways
5
Handling Hardware Interrupts
6
Working with Kernel Timers, Threads, and Workqueues
7
Section 2: Delving Deeper

The "one value per sysfs file" rule

So far, you have understood how to create and make use of sysfs for user space kernel interfacing purposes, but there is a key point that we have been ignoring. There is a "rule" regarding using sysfs files, which states that you must only read or write exactly one value! Think of this as the one-value-per-file rule.

So, as in the example where we used the "pressure" value, we merely return the current value of the pressure, nothing more. Thus, sysfs, unlike the other interfacing technologies, is not quite suited to those cases where you might want to return arbitrary long-winded information packets (say, the contents of the driver context structure) to the user space; in other words, it's not suited to pure "debugging" purposes.

The kernel documents and "rules" regarding the usage of sysfs can be found here: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/sysfs-rules.html#rules-on...