Environment setup

Before you start any development, you need to set an environment up. The environment dedicated to Linux development is quite simple, at least on Debian-based systems:

 $ sudo apt-get update
 $ sudo apt-get install gawk wget git diffstat unzip texinfo \
 gcc-multilib build-essential chrpath socat libsdl1.2-dev \
 xterm ncurses-dev lzop  

There are parts of code in this book that are compatible with ARM system on chip (SoC). You should install gcc-arm as well:

 sudo apt-get install gcc-arm-linux-gnueabihf

I'm running Ubuntu 16.04, on an ASUS RoG, with an Intel core i7 (eight physical cores), 16 GB of RAM, 256 GB of SSD, and 1 TB of magnetic hard drive. My favorite editor is Vim, but you are free to use the one you are most comfortable with.

Getting the sources

In the early kernel days (until 2003), odd-even versioning styles were used, where odd numbers were stable and even numbers were unstable. When the 2.6 version was released, the versioning scheme switched to X.Y.Z, where:

• X: This was the actual kernel version, also called major; it incremented when there were backwards-incompatible API changes
• Y: This was the minor revision; it incremented after adding a functionality in a backwards-compatible manner
• Z: This is also called PATCH, representing the version relative to bug fixes

This is called semantic versioning, and has been used until the 2.6.39 version; when Linus Torvalds decided to bump the version to 3.0, which also meant the end of semantic versioning in 2011, and then an X.Y scheme was adopted.

When it came to the 3.20 version, Linus argued that he could no longer increase Y, and decided to switch to an arbitrary versioning scheme, incrementing X whenever Y got large enough that he ran out of fingers and toes to count it. This is the reason why the version has moved from 3.20 to 4.0 directly. Have a look at https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/jmtzzLiiejc.

Now, the kernel uses an arbitrary X.Y versioning scheme, which has nothing to do with semantic versioning.

Source organization

For the needs of this book, you must use Linus Torvald's GitHub repository:

 git clone https://github.com/torvalds/linux
 git checkout v4.1
 ls

• arch/: The Linux kernel is a fast growing project that supports more and more architectures. That being said, the kernel wants to be as generic as possible. Architecture-specific code is separated from the rest, and falls into this directory. This directory contains processor-specific subdirectories such as alpha/, arm/, mips/, blackfin/, and so on.
• block/: This directory contains code for block storage devices, actually the scheduling algorithm.
• crypto/: This directory contains the cryptographic API and the encryption algorithms code.
• Documentation/: This should be your favorite directory. It contains the descriptions of APIs used for different kernel frameworks and subsystems. You should look here prior to asking any questions on forums.
• drivers/: This is the heaviest directory, continuously growing as device drivers get merged. It contains every device driver organized in various subdirectories.
• fs/: This directory contains the implementation of different filesystems that the kernel actually supports, such as NTFS, FAT, ETX{2,3,4}, sysfs, procfs, NFS, and so on.
• include/: This contains kernel header files.
• init/: This directory contains the initialization and start up code.
• ipc/: This contains implementation of the Inter-Process Communication (IPC) mechanisms, such as message queues, semaphores, and shared memory..
• kernel/: This directory contains architecture-independent portions of the base kernel.
• lib/: Library routines and some helper functions live here. They are generic kernel object (kobject) handlers, Cyclic Redundancy Code (CRC) computation functions, and so on.
• mm/: This contains memory management code.
• net/: This contains networking (whatever network type it is) protocols code.
• scripts/: This contains scripts and tools used during kernel development. There are other useful tools here.
• security/: This directory contains the security framework code.
• sound/: Audio subsystems code is here.
• usr/: This currently contains the initramfs implementation.

The kernel must remain portable. Any architecture-specific code should be located in the arch directory. Of course, the kernel code related to the user space API does not change (system calls, /proc, /sys), as it would break the existing programs.

This book deals with version 4.1 of the kernel. Therefore, any changes made until v4.11 version are covered too, at least this can be said about the frameworks and subsystems.

Kernel configuration

The Linux kernel is a makefile-based project, with thousands of options and drivers. To configure your kernel, either use make menuconfig for an ncurse-based interface or make xconfig for an X-based interface. Once chosen, options will be stored in a .config file, at the root of the source tree.

In most cases, there will be no need to start a configuration from scratch. There are default and useful configuration files available in each arch directory, which you can use as a starting point:

 ls arch/<you_arch>/configs/  

For ARM-based CPUs, these configs files are located in arch/arm/configs/, and for an i.MX6 processor, the default file config is arch/arm/configs/imx_v6_v7_defconfig. Similarly, for x86 processors we find the files in arch/x86/configs/, with only two default configuration files, i386_defconfig and x86_64_defconfig, for 32- and 64-bit versions respectively. It is quite straightforward for an x86 system:

make x86_64_defconfig 
make zImage -j16 
make modules 
makeINSTALL_MOD_PATH </where/to/install> modules_install 

Given an i.MX6-based board, you can start with ARCH=arm make imx_v6_v7_defconfig, and then ARCH=arm make menuconfig. With the former command, you will store the default option in the .config file, and with the latter, you can update add/remove options, depending on the need.

You may run into a Qt4 error with xconfig. In such a case, you should just use the following command:

sudo apt-get install  qt4-dev-tools qt4-qmake 

Building your kernel

Building the kernel requires you to specify the architecture for which it is built, as well as the compiler. That said, it is not necessary for a native build:

ARCH=arm make imx_v6_v7_defconfig
ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=arm-linux-gnueabihf- make zImage -j16  

After that, you will see something like:

    [...]
      LZO     arch/arm/boot/compressed/piggy_data
      CC      arch/arm/boot/compressed/misc.o
      CC      arch/arm/boot/compressed/decompress.o
      CC      arch/arm/boot/compressed/string.o
      SHIPPED arch/arm/boot/compressed/hyp-stub.S
      SHIPPED arch/arm/boot/compressed/lib1funcs.S
      SHIPPED arch/arm/boot/compressed/ashldi3.S
      SHIPPED arch/arm/boot/compressed/bswapsdi2.S
      AS      arch/arm/boot/compressed/hyp-stub.o
      AS      arch/arm/boot/compressed/lib1funcs.o
      AS      arch/arm/boot/compressed/ashldi3.o
      AS      arch/arm/boot/compressed/bswapsdi2.o
      AS      arch/arm/boot/compressed/piggy.o
      LD      arch/arm/boot/compressed/vmlinux
      OBJCOPY arch/arm/boot/zImage
      Kernel: arch/arm/boot/zImage is ready      

From the kernel build, the result will be a single binary image located in arch/arm/boot/. Modules are built with the following command:

 ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=arm-linux-gnueabihf- make modules 

You can install them using the following command:

ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=arm-linux-gnueabihf- make modules_install

The modules_install target expects an environment variable, INSTALL_MOD_PATH, which specifies where you should install the modules. If not set, the modules will be installed at /lib/modules/$(KERNELRELEASE)/kernel/. This is discussed in Chapter 2, Device Driver Basis.

i.MX6 processors support device trees, which are files you use to describe the hardware (this is discussed in detail in Chapter 6, The Concept of Device Tree). To compile every ARCH device tree, you can run the following command:

ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=arm-linux-gnueabihf- make dtbs

However, the dtbs option is not available on all platforms that support device tree. To build a standalone DTB, you should use:

ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=arm-linux-gnueabihf- make imx6d-    sabrelite.dtb