Book Image

Hands-On System Programming with Linux

By : Kaiwan N. Billimoria, Tigran Aivazian
Book Image

Hands-On System Programming with Linux

By: Kaiwan N. Billimoria, Tigran Aivazian

Overview of this book

The Linux OS and its embedded and server applications are critical components of today’s software infrastructure in a decentralized, networked universe. The industry's demand for proficient Linux developers is only rising with time. Hands-On System Programming with Linux gives you a solid theoretical base and practical industry-relevant descriptions, and covers the Linux system programming domain. It delves into the art and science of Linux application programming— system architecture, process memory and management, signaling, timers, pthreads, and file IO. This book goes beyond the use API X to do Y approach; it explains the concepts and theories required to understand programming interfaces and design decisions, the tradeoffs made by experienced developers when using them, and the rationale behind them. Troubleshooting tips and techniques are included in the concluding chapter. By the end of this book, you will have gained essential conceptual design knowledge and hands-on experience working with Linux system programming interfaces.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)

Gracefully handling process crashes

A bug in the application that caused a crash at runtime? My God, how is this possible?

Unfortunately, to the well-heeled software veteran, though, this is not a big surprise. Bugs exist; they can hide really well, for years, sometimes; one day, they come out and—bang!the process crashes.

Here, our intention is not to discuss debugging techniques or tools (let's save that for another book perhaps, shall we?); instead, it's this key point: if our application process does crash, can we do something? Certainly: in the previous chapter, we have learned in detail how we can trap signals. Why not design our application such that we trap the typical fatal signals—the SIGBUS, SIGFPE, SIGILL, and SIGSEGV—and, in their signal handler(s), perform useful tasks such as these:

  • Perform critical application cleanup&...