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Linux Kernel Programming Part 2 - Char Device Drivers and Kernel Synchronization

Linux Kernel Programming Part 2 - Char Device Drivers and Kernel Synchronization

By : Kaiwan N. Billimoria
4.4 (5)
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Linux Kernel Programming Part 2 - Char Device Drivers and Kernel Synchronization

Linux Kernel Programming Part 2 - Char Device Drivers and Kernel Synchronization

4.4 (5)
By: Kaiwan N. Billimoria

Overview of this book

Linux Kernel Programming Part 2 - Char Device Drivers and Kernel Synchronization is an ideal companion guide to the Linux Kernel Programming book. This book provides a comprehensive introduction for those new to Linux device driver development and will have you up and running with writing misc class character device driver code (on the 5.4 LTS Linux kernel) in next to no time. You'll begin by learning how to write a simple and complete misc class character driver before interfacing your driver with user-mode processes via procfs, sysfs, debugfs, netlink sockets, and ioctl. You'll then find out how to work with hardware I/O memory. The book covers working with hardware interrupts in depth and helps you understand interrupt request (IRQ) allocation, threaded IRQ handlers, tasklets, and softirqs. You'll also explore the practical usage of useful kernel mechanisms, setting up delays, timers, kernel threads, and workqueues. Finally, you'll discover how to deal with the complexity of kernel synchronization with locking technologies (mutexes, spinlocks, and atomic/refcount operators), including more advanced topics such as cache effects, a primer on lock-free techniques, deadlock avoidance (with lockdep), and kernel lock debugging techniques. By the end of this Linux kernel book, you'll have learned the fundamentals of writing Linux character device driver code for real-world projects and products.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)
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1
Section 1: Character Device Driver Basics
3
User-Kernel Communication Pathways
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5
Handling Hardware Interrupts
6
Working with Kernel Timers, Threads, and Workqueues
7
Section 2: Delving Deeper

Looking up the debugfs API documentation

The kernel supplies succinct and superb documentation on using the debugfs API (courtesy of Jonathan Corbet, LWN) here: https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/filesystems/debugfs.txt (of course, you can also look it up directly within the kernel codebase).

I urge you to refer to this document to learn how to use the debugfs APIs, since it's easy to read and understand; this way, you can avoid unnecessarily repeating the same information here. In addition to the aforementioned document, the modern kernel documentation system (the "Sphinx"-based one) also provides quite detailed debugfs API pages: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/filesystems/api-summary.html?highlight=debugfs#the-debugfs-filesystem.

Note that all debugfs APIs are exported as GPL-only to kernel modules (thus necessitating the module being released under the "GPL" license (this can be dual licensed, but one must be "GPL")).

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