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

Mutex lock and unlock APIs and their usage

The actual locking and unlocking APIs for the mutex lock are as follows. The following code shows how to lock and unlock a mutex, respectively:

void __sched mutex_lock(struct mutex *lock);
void __sched mutex_unlock(struct mutex *lock);

(Ignore __sched here; it's just a compiler attribute that has this function disappear in the WCHAN output, which shows up in procfs and with certain option switches to ps(1) (such as -l)).

Again, the comments within the source code in kernel/locking/mutex.c are very detailed and descriptive; I encourage you to take a look at this file in more detail. We've only shown some of its code here, which has been taken directly from the 5.4 Linux kernel source tree:

// kernel/locking/mutex.c
[ ... ]
/**
* mutex_lock - acquire the mutex
* @lock: the mutex to be acquired
*
* Lock the mutex exclusively for this task. If the mutex is not
* available right now, it will sleep until it can get it...