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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

Size limitations of the kmalloc API

One of the key advantages of both the page and slab allocators is that the memory chunk they provide upon allocation is not only virtually contiguous (obviously) but is also guaranteed to be physically contiguous memory. Now that is a big deal and will certainly help performance.

But (there’s always a but, isn’t there!), precisely because of this guarantee, it becomes impossible to serve up any given large (memory) size when performing an allocation. In other words, there must be a limit to the amount of memory you can obtain from the slab allocator with a single call to our dear k{m|z}alloc() APIs. What is the limit? (This is indeed a really frequently asked question).

Firstly, you should understand that, technically, this limit is determined by two factors:

  • One, the system page size (determined by the PAGE_SIZE macro).
  • Two, the number of “orders” (determined by the MAX_ORDER macro); that is...
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