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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

Caveats when using the slab allocator

We will split up this discussion into three parts. We will first re-examine some necessary background (which we covered earlier), then actually flesh out the problem that we’re getting at with two use cases – the first being very simple; the second being a more real-world case of the issue at hand.

Background details and conclusions

So far, you have learned some key points:

  • The page (or buddy system) allocator allocates pages to the caller in powers of 2 pages; in other words, the granularity of an allocation request is a page (typically 4K). The power to raise 2 is called the order; it typically ranges from 0 to 10 (on both x86[_64] and ARM[_64], assuming a page size of 4K and MAX_ORDER of 11).
  • This is fine, except when it’s not. When the amount of memory requested is very small, or just over a certain threshold, the wastage (or internal fragmentation) can be huge.
  • In the day-to-day operation...
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