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 bitwise atomic operators – an example

Let's check out a quick kernel module that demonstrates the usage of the Linux kernel's RMW atomic bit operators ( ch13/1_rmw_atomic_bitops). You should realize that these operators can work on any memory, both a (CPU or device) register or RAM; here, we operate on a simple static global variable (named memwithin the example LKM. It's very simple; let's check it out:

// ch13/1_rmw_atomic_bitops/rmw_atomic_bitops.c
[ ... ]
#include <linux/spinlock.h>
#include <linux/atomic.h>
#include <linux/bitops.h>
#include "../../convenient.h"
[ ... ]
static unsigned long mem;
static u64 t1, t2;
static int MSB = BITS_PER_BYTE - 1;
DEFINE_SPINLOCK(slock);

We include the required headers and declare and initialize a few global variables (notice how our MSB variable uses BIT_PER_BYTE). We employ a simple macro, SHOW(), to display the formatted output with the printk. The init ...