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Linux Kernel Programming

You're reading from  Linux Kernel Programming

Product type Book
Published in Mar 2021
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781789953435
Pages 754 pages
Edition 1st Edition
Languages
Author (1):
Kaiwan N. Billimoria Kaiwan N. Billimoria
Profile icon Kaiwan N. Billimoria
Toc

Table of Contents (19) Chapters close

Preface 1. Section 1: The Basics
2. Kernel Workspace Setup 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

Locking and interrupts

So far, we have learned how to use the mutex lock and, for the spinlock, the basic spin_[un]lock() APIs. A few other API variations on the spinlock exist, and we shall examine the more common ones here.

To understand exactly why you may need other APIs for spinlocks, let's go over a scenario: as a driver author, you find that the device you're working on asserts a hardware interrupt; accordingly, you write the interrupt handler for it (You can learn great detail about it in the Linux Kernel Programming (Part 2) book). Now, while implementing a read method for your driver, you find that you have a non-blocking critical section within it. This is easy to deal with: as you have learned, you should use a spinlock to protect it. Great! But what if, while in the read method's critical section, the device's hardware interrupt fires? As you're aware, hardware interrupts preempt anything and everything; thus, control will go to...

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