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Linux System Programming Techniques

Linux System Programming Techniques

By : Jack-Benny Persson
4.8 (8)
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Linux System Programming Techniques

Linux System Programming Techniques

4.8 (8)
By: Jack-Benny Persson

Overview of this book

Linux is the world's most popular open source operating system (OS). Linux System Programming Techniques will enable you to extend the Linux OS with your own system programs and communicate with other programs on the system. The book begins by exploring the Linux filesystem, its basic commands, built-in manual pages, the GNU compiler collection (GCC), and Linux system calls. You'll then discover how to handle errors in your programs and will learn to catch errors and print relevant information about them. The book takes you through multiple recipes on how to read and write files on the system, using both streams and file descriptors. As you advance, you'll delve into forking, creating zombie processes, and daemons, along with recipes on how to handle daemons using systemd. After this, you'll find out how to create shared libraries and start exploring different types of interprocess communication (IPC). In the later chapters, recipes on how to write programs using POSIX threads and how to debug your programs using the GNU debugger (GDB) and Valgrind will also be covered. By the end of this Linux book, you will be able to develop your own system programs for Linux, including daemons, tools, clients, and filters.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
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Avoiding race conditions with mutexes

A mutex is a locking mechanism that prevents access to a shared variable so that no more than one thread can access it simultaneously. This prevents race conditions. With a mutex, we only lock the critical part of the code, for example, the updating of a shared variable. This will make sure that all other parts of the program run in parallel (if this is possible with the locking mechanism).

However, if we are not careful when we write our programs, a mutex can slow down the program a lot, which we'll see in this recipe. In the next recipe, we'll fix this problem.

Knowing how to use mutexes will help you overcome many of the problems associated with race conditions, making your programs safer and better.

Getting ready

In order for this recipe to make sense, it's advised that you complete the previous recipe first. You'll also need the Makefile that we wrote in the first recipe of this chapter, the GCC compiler, and...

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