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

Mutex lock and unlock APIs and their usage

The actual locking and unlocking APIs for the mutex lock are as follows. The following code shows how to lock and unlock a mutex, respectively:

void __sched mutex_lock(struct mutex *lock);
void __sched mutex_unlock(struct mutex *lock);

(Ignore __sched here; it's just a compiler attribute that has this function disappear in the WCHAN output, which shows up in procfs and with certain option switches to ps(1) (such as -l)).

Again, the comments within the source code in kernel/locking/mutex.c are very detailed and descriptive; I encourage you to take a look at this file in more detail. We've only shown some of its code here, which has been taken directly from the 5.4 Linux kernel source tree:

// kernel/locking/mutex.c
[ ... ]
/**
* mutex_lock - acquire the mutex
* @lock: the mutex to be acquired
*
* Lock the mutex exclusively for this task. If the mutex is not
* available right now, it will sleep until it can get it...