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)

Thread cancelation and cleanup

The pthreads design provides a sophisticated framework for achieving two other key activities for a robust multithreaded application: the ability to have a thread in the app cancel (effectively, kill) another thread, and the ability to have a thread that is either terminated normally (via the pthread_exit(3)) or abnormally (via cancelation) be able to perform the required resource cleanup.

The following sections deal with these topics.

Canceling a thread

Visualize a GUI application running; it pops up a dialog box informing the user that it is now performing some work (perhaps displaying a progress bar as well). We imagine that this work is being carried out by a thread of the overall application...