Book Image

C++ System Programming Cookbook

By : Onorato Vaticone
Book Image

C++ System Programming Cookbook

By: Onorato Vaticone

Overview of this book

C++ is the preferred language for system programming due to its efficient low-level computation, data abstraction, and object-oriented features. System programming is about designing and writing computer programs that interact closely with the underlying operating system and allow computer hardware to interface with the programmer and the user. The C++ System Programming Cookbook will serve as a reference for developers who want to have ready-to-use solutions for the essential aspects of system programming using the latest C++ standards wherever possible. This C++ book starts out by giving you an overview of system programming and refreshing your C++ knowledge. Moving ahead, you will learn how to deal with threads and processes, before going on to discover recipes for how to manage memory. The concluding chapters will then help you understand how processes communicate and how to interact with the console (console I/O). Finally, you will learn how to deal with time interfaces, signals, and CPU scheduling. By the end of the book, you will become adept at developing robust systems applications using C++.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Dealing with memory-mapped I/O

Sometimes, we need to operate on memory in a way that is not conventional or, so to speak, not common. As we've seen, memory is allocated with new and released with delete (or, even better, with make_unique and make_shared). There might be cases in which we need to skip some layer—that is, using a Linux system call; for the sake of performance; or because of a custom behavior that we cannot map with the C++ standard library. This is the case with the mmap Linux system call (man 2 mmap). mmap is a POSIX-compliant system call that allows the programmer to map a file to a portion of memory. Among other things, mmap also allows memory to be allocated, and this recipe will teach you how to do it.

How to do it.....