Book Image

Linux Kernel Programming Part 2 - Char Device Drivers and Kernel Synchronization

By : Kaiwan N. Billimoria
Book Image

Linux Kernel Programming Part 2 - Char Device Drivers and Kernel Synchronization

By: Kaiwan N. Billimoria

Overview of this book

Linux Kernel Programming Part 2 - Char Device Drivers and Kernel Synchronization is an ideal companion guide to the Linux Kernel Programming book. This book provides a comprehensive introduction for those new to Linux device driver development and will have you up and running with writing misc class character device driver code (on the 5.4 LTS Linux kernel) in next to no time. You'll begin by learning how to write a simple and complete misc class character driver before interfacing your driver with user-mode processes via procfs, sysfs, debugfs, netlink sockets, and ioctl. You'll then find out how to work with hardware I/O memory. The book covers working with hardware interrupts in depth and helps you understand interrupt request (IRQ) allocation, threaded IRQ handlers, tasklets, and softirqs. You'll also explore the practical usage of useful kernel mechanisms, setting up delays, timers, kernel threads, and workqueues. Finally, you'll discover how to deal with the complexity of kernel synchronization with locking technologies (mutexes, spinlocks, and atomic/refcount operators), including more advanced topics such as cache effects, a primer on lock-free techniques, deadlock avoidance (with lockdep), and kernel lock debugging techniques. By the end of this Linux kernel book, you'll have learned the fundamentals of writing Linux character device driver code for real-world projects and products.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)
1
Section 1: Character Device Driver Basics
3
User-Kernel Communication Pathways
5
Handling Hardware Interrupts
6
Working with Kernel Timers, Threads, and Workqueues
7
Section 2: Delving Deeper

Understanding the proc filesystem

Linux has a virtual filesystem named proc; the default mount point for it is /proc. The first thing to realize regarding the proc filesystem is that its content is not on a non-volatile disk. Its content is in RAM, and is thus volatile. The files and directories you can see under /proc are pseudo files that have been set up by the kernel code for proc; the kernel hints at this fact by (almost) always showing the file's size as zero:

$ mount | grep -w proc
proc on /proc type proc (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
$ ls -l /proc/
total 0
dr-xr-xr-x 8 root root 0 Jan 27 11:13 1/
dr-xr-xr-x 8 root root 0 Jan 29 08:22 10/
dr-xr-xr-x 8 root root 0 Jan 29 08:22 11/
dr-xr-xr-x 8 root root 0 Jan 29 08:22 11550/
[...]
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 0 Jan 29 08:22 consoles
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 0 Jan 29 08:19 cpuinfo
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 0 Jan 29 08:22 crypto
-r--r--r-- 1 root root ...