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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

Understanding the VM split

In this chapter, we will broadly look at how the Linux kernel manages memory in two ways:

  • The virtual memory-based approach, where memory is virtualized (the usual case)
  • A view of how the kernel organizes physical memory (RAM pages)

First, let’s begin with the virtual memory view and then discuss physical memory organization later in the chapter.

As we saw in Chapter 6, Kernel Internals Essentials – Processes and Threads, in the Understanding the basics of the process Virtual Address Space (VAS) section, a key property of the process VAS is that it is completely self-contained, a sandbox. You cannot look outside the box. In that chapter, in Figure 6.2, we saw that the process VAS ranges from virtual address 0x0 to what we simply termed as the “high address.” What is the actual value of this “high” address? It’s the highest extent of the VAS and thus depends on the number of bits...

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