Book Image

Extreme C

By : Kamran Amini
5 (1)
Book Image

Extreme C

5 (1)
By: Kamran Amini

Overview of this book

There’s a lot more to C than knowing the language syntax. The industry looks for developers with a rigorous, scientific understanding of the principles and practices. Extreme C will teach you to use C’s advanced low-level power to write effective, efficient systems. This intensive, practical guide will help you become an expert C programmer. Building on your existing C knowledge, you will master preprocessor directives, macros, conditional compilation, pointers, and much more. You will gain new insight into algorithm design, functions, and structures. You will discover how C helps you squeeze maximum performance out of critical, resource-constrained applications. C still plays a critical role in 21st-century programming, remaining the core language for precision engineering, aviations, space research, and more. This book shows how C works with Unix, how to implement OO principles in C, and fully covers multi-processing. In Extreme C, Amini encourages you to think, question, apply, and experiment for yourself. The book is essential for anybody who wants to take their C to the next level.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)

Unix kernels

In this section, we are going to talk about the architectures that Unix kernels have been developed with throughout the last 30 years. Before talking about the different types of kernels, and there are not very many, we should know that there is no standardization about the way a kernel should be designed.

The best practices that we have obtained are based on our experiences over the years, and they have led us to a high-level picture of the internal units in a Unix kernel, which results in illustrations such as Figure 10-5 in the previous chapter. Therefore, each kernel is somewhat different in comparison to another. The main thing that all of them have in common is that they should expose their functionalities through a system call interface. However, every kernel has its own way of handling system calls.

This variety and the debates around it have made it one of the hottest computer architecture-related topics of the 1990s, with large groups of people taking part...