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)

Signaling – caveats and gotchas

Signals, being asynchronous events, can cause errors and bugs in subtle ways that are not immediately apparent to the casual reviewer (or programmer, for that matter). Some kinds of functionality or behavior are directly or indirectly affected by the arrival of one or more signal; you need to be alert to possible subtle races and similar conditions.

One important area in this that we have already covered is as follows: inside a signal handler, you can only invoke functions that are documented as being (or have been designed to be) async-signal safe. Other areas too deserve some contemplation; read on.

Handling errno gracefully

A race with the uninitialized global integer errno can occur...