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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 physical memory organization

Now that we have examined the virtual memory view for both user and kernel VASs in quite some detail, let’s turn to the topic of physical memory organization on the Linux OS.

Physical RAM organization

The Linux kernel, at boot, organizes and partitions physical RAM into a tree-like hierarchy consisting of nodes, zones, and page frames (page frames are physical pages of RAM) (see Figure 7.22 and Figure 7.23). Do note that further organization via physical memory models is also performed at early boot and is a related discussion; we will throw some light on this in the An introduction to physical memory models section.

Nodes are divided into zones, and zones consist of page frames. It’s essentially a tree-like hierarchy, simplistically and conceptually depicted as a three-level tree-like hierarchy like this:

  • Node(s) ← Level 1
    • Zone(s) ← Level 2
      • Page frames ← Level...
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