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 mutex io variant

The mutex_lock_io() API is identical in syntax to the mutex_lock() API; the only difference is that the kernel thinks that the wait time of the loser thread(s) is the same as waiting for I/O (the code comment in kernel/locking/mutex.c:mutex_lock_io() clearly documents this; take a look). This can matter accounting-wise.

You can find fairly exotic APIs such as mutex_lock[_interruptible]_nested() within the kernel, with the emphasis here being on the nested suffix. However, note that the Linux kernel does not prefer developers to use nested (or recursive) locking (as we mentioned in the Correctly using the mutex lock section). Also, these APIs only get compiled in the presence of the CONFIG_DEBUG_LOCK_ALLOC config option; in effect, the nested APIs were added to support the kernel lock validator mechanism. They should only be used in special circumstances (where a nesting level must be incorporated between...