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

Using the new slab cache's memory

So, okay, we created a custom slab cache. To make use of it, you must issue the kmem_cache_alloc() API. Its job: given the pointer to a slab cache (which you just created), it allocates a single instance of an object on that slab cache (in fact, this is really how the k[m|z]alloc() APIs work under the hood). Its signature is as follows (of course, remember to always include the <linux/slab.h> header for all slab-based APIs):

void *kmem_cache_alloc(struct kmem_cache *s, gfp_t gfpflags);

Let's look at its parameters:

  • The first parameter to kmem_cache_alloc() is the pointer to the (custom) cache that we created in the previous step (the pointer being the return value from the kmem_cache_create()API).
  • The second parameter is the usual GFP flags to pass along (remember the essential rule: use GFP_KERNEL for normal process-context allocations, else GFP_ATOMIC if in any...