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Linux Kernel Programming

Linux Kernel Programming

By : Kaiwan N. Billimoria
4.9 (35)
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Linux Kernel Programming

Linux Kernel Programming

4.9 (35)
By: Kaiwan N. Billimoria

Overview of this book

The 2nd Edition of Linux Kernel Programming is an updated, comprehensive guide for new programmers to the Linux kernel. This book uses the recent 6.1 Long-Term Support (LTS) Linux kernel series, which will be maintained until Dec 2026, and also delves into its many new features. Further, the Civil Infrastructure Project has pledged to maintain and support this 6.1 Super LTS (SLTS) kernel right until August 2033, keeping this book valid for years to come! You’ll begin this exciting journey by learning how to build the kernel from source. In a step by step manner, you will then learn how to write your first kernel module by leveraging the kernel’s powerful Loadable Kernel Module (LKM) framework. With this foundation, you will delve into key kernel internals topics including Linux kernel architecture, memory management, and CPU (task) scheduling. You’ll finish with understanding the deep issues of concurrency, and gain insight into how they can be addressed with various synchronization/locking technologies (e.g., mutexes, spinlocks, atomic/refcount operators, rw-spinlocks and even lock-free technologies such as per-CPU and RCU). By the end of this book, you’ll have a much better understanding of the fundamentals of writing the Linux kernel and kernel module code that can straight away be used in real-world projects and products.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
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14
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15
Index

Using the reader-writer spinlock

Visualize a piece of kernel (or driver) code wherein a large, global data structure – say, a doubly linked circular list with a few thousand nodes or more – is being searched. Now, since this data structure is global (shared and writable), accessing it concurrently constitutes a critical section, and that requires protection.

Assuming a scenario where searching the list is a non-blocking operation, you’d typically use a spinlock to protect the critical section.

A naive approach might propose not using a lock at all, since we’re only reading data within the list, not updating it. But, of course, even a read on shared writable data has to be protected in order to protect against an inadvertent write occurring simultaneously (as you have learned – refer back to the previous chapter if required), thus resulting in a dirty or torn read.

So we conclude that we require the spinlock; we imagine the...

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