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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

Creating a custom slab cache

As explained in detail in the previous chapter, a key design concept behind slab caches is the powerful idea of object caching. By caching frequently used objects – data structures, really – the memory alloca­tion/free work for those objects are much quicker and thus overall performance receives a boost.

So, think about this: what if we’re writing a driver and within it, we notice that a certain data structure (an object) is very frequently allocated and freed? Normally, we would use the usual kzalloc() (or kmalloc()) followed by the kfree() APIs to allocate and free this object. Some good news: the Linux kernel sufficiently exposes the slab layer API to us, the module/driver authors, allowing us to create custom slab caches. In this section, you’ll learn how you can leverage this powerful feature.

Creating and using a custom slab cache within a kernel module

In this section, we will create, use, and subsequently...

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