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Linux Kernel Programming

You're reading from   Linux Kernel Programming A comprehensive guide to kernel internals, writing kernel modules, and kernel synchronization

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Product type Paperback
Published in Mar 2021
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781789953435
Length 754 pages
Edition 1st Edition
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Author (1):
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Kaiwan N. Billimoria Kaiwan N. Billimoria
Author Profile Icon Kaiwan N. Billimoria
Kaiwan N. Billimoria
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Table of Contents (19) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Section 1: The Basics
2. Kernel Workspace Setup FREE CHAPTER 3. Building the 5.x Linux Kernel from Source - Part 1 4. Building the 5.x Linux Kernel from Source - Part 2 5. Writing Your First Kernel Module - LKMs Part 1 6. Writing Your First Kernel Module - LKMs Part 2 7. Section 2: Understanding and Working with the Kernel
8. Kernel Internals Essentials - Processes and Threads 9. Memory Management Internals - Essentials 10. Kernel Memory Allocation for Module Authors - Part 1 11. Kernel Memory Allocation for Module Authors - Part 2 12. The CPU Scheduler - Part 1 13. The CPU Scheduler - Part 2 14. Section 3: Delving Deeper
15. Kernel Synchronization - Part 1 16. Kernel Synchronization - Part 2 17. About Packt 18. Other Books You May Enjoy

Preemptible kernel

Let's take a hypothetical situation: you're running on a system with one CPU. An analog clock app is running on the GUI along with a C program, a.out, whose one line of code is (groan) while(1);. So, what do you think: will the CPU hogger while 1 process indefinitely hog the CPU, thus causing the GUI clock app to stop ticking (will its second hand stop moving altogether)?

A little thought (and experimentation) will reveal that, indeed, the GUI clock app keeps ticking in spite of the naughty CPU hogger app! Actually, this is really the whole point of having an OS-level scheduler: it can, and does, preempt the CPU-hogging user space process. (We briefly discussed the CFS algorithm previously; CFS will cause the aggressive CPU hogger process to accumulate a huge vruntime value and thus move more to the right on its rb-tree runqueue, thus penalizing itself!) All modern OSes support this type of preemption – it's called user-mode preemption...

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