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Linux Kernel Programming Part 2 - Char Device Drivers and Kernel Synchronization

You're reading from  Linux Kernel Programming Part 2 - Char Device Drivers and Kernel Synchronization

Product type Book
Published in Mar 2021
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781801079518
Pages 452 pages
Edition 1st Edition
Languages
Author (1):
Kaiwan N. Billimoria Kaiwan N. Billimoria
Profile icon Kaiwan N. Billimoria
Toc

Table of Contents (11) Chapters close

Preface 1. Section 1: Character Device Driver Basics
2. Writing a Simple misc Character Device Driver 3. User-Kernel Communication Pathways 4. Working with Hardware I/O Memory 5. Handling Hardware Interrupts 6. Working with Kernel Timers, Threads, and Workqueues 7. Section 2: Delving Deeper
8. Kernel Synchronization - Part 1 9. Kernel Synchronization - Part 2 10. Other Books You May Enjoy

Mutex lock  via [un]interruptible sleep?

As usual, there's more to the mutex than what we've seen so far. You already know that a Linux process (or thread) cycles through various states of a state machine. On Linux, sleeping has two discrete states an interruptible sleep and an uninterruptible sleep. A process (or thread) in an interruptible sleep is sensitive, which means it will respond to user space signals, whereas a task in an uninterruptible sleep is not sensitive to user signals.

In a human-interactive application with an underlying driver, as a general rule of thumb, you should typically put a process into an interruptible sleep (while it's blocking upon the lock), thus leaving it up to the end user as to whether to abort the application by pressing Ctrl + C (or some such mechanism involving signals). There is a design rule that's often followed on Unix-like systems: provide mechanism, not&...

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