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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 locking – an example driver

We have created a simple device driver code example in Chapter 1Writing a Simple misc Character Device Driver; that is, ch1/miscdrv_rdwr. There, we wrote a simple misc class character device driver and used a user space utility program (ch12/miscdrv_rdwr/rdwr_drv_secret.c) to read and write a (so-called) secret from and to the device driver's memory.

However, what we glaringly (egregiously is the right word here!) failed to do in that code is protect shared (global) writeable data! This will cost us dearly in the real world. I urge you to take some time to think about this: it isn't viable that two (or three or more) user mode processes open the device file of this driver, and then concurrently issue various I/O reads and writes. Here, the global shared writable data (in this particular case, two global integers and the driver context data structure) could easily get corrupted.

So, let's learn from...

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