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

Specifying and using a tasklet

A key difference between a tasklet and the kernel's softirq mechanism is that tasklets are simply easier to work with, making them a good choice for your typical driver. Of course, if you can use a threaded handler instead, just do that; later, we'll show a table that will help you decide what to use and when. One of the key things that makes tasklets easier to use is the fact that (on an SMP system) a particular tasklet will never run in parallel with itself; in other words, a given tasklet will run on exactly one CPU at a time (making it non-concurrent, or serialized, with respect to itself).

The header comment in linux/interrupt.h gives us some important properties of the tasklet as well:

[...] Properties:
* If tasklet_schedule() is called, then tasklet is guaranteed
to be executed on some cpu at least once after this.
* If the tasklet is already scheduled, but its execution is still not
started, it will be executed only once...