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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

Mutex locking – an example driver

We have created a simple device driver code example in the Linux Kernel Programming (Part 2) book in the Writing a Simple misc Character Device Driver chapter; that is, miscdrv_rdwr. There, we wrote a simple misc class character device driver and used a user space utility program (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...

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