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

Summary

Congratulations on completing this chapter!

Understanding concurrency and its related concerns is absolutely critical for any software professional. In this chapter, you learned key concepts regarding critical sections, the need for exclusive execution within them, and what atomicity means. You then learned why we need to be concerned with concurrency while writing code for the Linux OS. After that, we delved into the actual locking technologies  mutex locks and spinlocks  in detail. You also learned what lock you should use and when. Finally, learning how to handle concurrency concerns when hardware interrupts (and their possible bottom halves) are in play was covered.

But we aren't done yet! There are many more concepts and technologies we need to learn about, which is just what we will do in the next, and final, chapter of this book. I suggest that you digest the content of this chapter well first by browsing through it, as well as the...