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

Querying/setting KASLR status with a script

We provide a simple Bash script at <book-source>/ch7/ASLR_check.sh. It checks for the presence of both (user-mode) ASLR as well as KASLR, printing (color-coded!) status information about them. It also allows you to change the ASLR value.

Let's give it a spin on our x86_64 Ubuntu 18.04 guest. As our script is programmed to be color-coded, we show a screenshot of its output here:

Figure 7.17 – Screenshot showing the output when our ch7/ASLR_check.sh Bash script runs on an x86_64 Ubuntu guest

It runs, showing you that (at least on this box) both the user mode as well as KASLR are indeed turned on. Not only that, we write a small "test" routine to see ASLR functioning. It's very simple: it runs the following command twice:

grep -E "heap|stack" /proc/self/maps

From what you learned in an earlier section, Interpreting the /proc/PID/maps output, you can now see in Figure 7.17, that the UVAs for...