Search icon CANCEL
Subscription
0
Cart icon
Your Cart (0 item)
Close icon
You have no products in your basket yet
Save more on your purchases now! discount-offer-chevron-icon
Savings automatically calculated. No voucher code required.
Arrow left icon
Explore Products
Best Sellers
New Releases
Books
Videos
Audiobooks
Learning Hub
Conferences
Free Learning
Arrow right icon
Arrow up icon
GO TO TOP
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 Create user-kernel interfaces, work with peripheral I/O, and handle hardware interrupts

Arrow left icon
Product type Paperback
Published in Mar 2021
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781801079518
Length 452 pages
Edition 1st Edition
Tools
Arrow right icon
Author (1):
Arrow left icon
Kaiwan N. Billimoria Kaiwan N. Billimoria
Author Profile Icon Kaiwan N. Billimoria
Kaiwan N. Billimoria
Arrow right icon
View More author details
Toc

Table of Contents (11) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Section 1: Character Device Driver Basics
2. Writing a Simple misc Character Device Driver FREE CHAPTER 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...

lock icon The rest of the chapter is locked
Register for a free Packt account to unlock a world of extra content!
A free Packt account unlocks extra newsletters, articles, discounted offers, and much more. Start advancing your knowledge today.
Unlock this book and the full library FREE for 7 days
Get unlimited access to 7000+ expert-authored eBooks and videos courses covering every tech area you can think of
Renews at $19.99/month. Cancel anytime