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

The sed3 mini project a very brief look

Let's conclude this chapter by taking a very brief look at the evolution of our sed2 project to sed3. This mini-project is identical to sed2 except that it's simpler! The (en/de)crypt work is now carried out by our work task (function) via the kernel's workqueue functionality or bottom-half mechanism. We use a workqueue the default kernel-global workqueue to get the work done instead of manually creating and managing kthreads (as we did in sed2)!

The following screenshot shows us accessing the kernel log of a sample run; in the run, we had the user mode app encrypt, then decrypt, and then retrieve the message for viewing. We've highlighted the interesting bit here – the execution of our work task via the kernel-global workqueue's worker threads in the two red rectangles:

Figure 5.13 – Kernel log when running our sed3 driver; the work task running via the default...