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

Generating the kernel documentation from source

You can literally generate the full Linux kernel documentation from within the kernel source tree in various popular formats (including PDF, HTML, LaTeX, EPUB, or XML), in a Javadoc or Doxygen-like style. The modern documentation system used internally by the kernel is called Sphinx. Using make help within the kernel source tree will reveal several documentation targets, among them htmldocs, pdfdocs, and more. So, you can, for example, cd to the kernel source tree and run make pdfdocs to build the complete Linux kernel documentation as PDF documents (the PDFs, as well as some other meta-docs, will be placed in Documentation/output/latex). The first time, at least, you will likely be prompted to install several packages and utilities (we don't show this explicitly).

Don't worry if the preceding details are not crystal clear yet. I suggest you first read Chapter 2Building the 5.x Linux Kernel from Source – Part 1, and Chapter 3, Building the 5.x Linux Kernel from Source – Part 2, and then revisit these details.