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)

Process Credentials

In this chapter, and the following one, the reader will learn concepts and practices regarding process credentials and capabilities. Besides being of practical importance to application development in Linux, this chapter, by its very nature, delves deeper into an often overlooked but extremely key aspect: security. The content of this and the following chapter is very much inter-related.

We divide the coverage of this key area into two major parts, each of which is a chapter in this book:

  • In this chapter, the traditional-style Unix permissions model is discussed in some detail, and techniques to run programs with root privileges without requiring the root password are shown.
  • In Chapter 8, Process Capabilities, the modern approach, the POSIX capabilities model, is discussed in some detail.

We will attempt to clearly show the reader that, while it is important...