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

Using the RMW bitwise operators

Here, we'll focus on employing the RMW bitwise operators; we'll leave it to you to explore the others (refer to the kernel docs mentioned). So, let's think again about how to more efficiently code our pseudocode example. We can set (to 1) any given bit in any register or memory item using the set_bit() API:

void set_bit(unsigned int nr, volatile unsigned long *p);

This atomically – safely and indivisibly – sets the nrth bit of p to 1. (The reality is that the device registers (and possibly device memory) are mapped into kernel virtual address space and thus appear to be visible as though they are RAM locations – such as the address p here. This is called MMIO and is the common way by which driver authors map in and work with device memory.)

Thus, with the RMW atomic operators, we can safely achieve what we've (incorrectly) attempted previously – turning on our (fictional) device &...