Kaiwan N Billimoria - Linux Kernel Programming Part 2 - Char Device Drivers and Kernel Synchronization

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Kaiwan N Billimoria taught himself BASIC programming on his dad's IBM PC back in 1983. He was programming in C and Assembly on DOS until he discovered the joys of Unix, and by around 1997, Linux!

Kaiwan has worked on many aspects of the Linux system programming stack, including Bash scripting, system programming in C, kernel internals, device drivers, and embedded Linux work. He has actively worked on several commercial/FOSS projects. His contributions include drivers to the mainline Linux OS and many smaller projects hosted on GitHub. His Linux passion feeds well into his passion for teaching these topics to engineers, which he has done for well over two decades now. He's also the author of Hands-On System Programming with Linux. It doesn't hurt that he is a recreational ultrarunner too.

Donald A. Tevault, but you can call him Donnie, got involved with Linux way back in 2006 and has been working with it ever since. He holds the Linux Professional Institute Level 3 Security certification, and the GIAC Incident Handler certification. Donnie is a professional Linux trainer, and thanks to the magic of the internet, teaches Linux classes literally the world over from the comfort of his living room. He's also a Linux security researcher for an IoT security company.

Anil Kumar is a Linux BSP and firmware developer at Intel. He has over 12 years of software development experience across many verticals, including IoT, mobile chipsets, laptops/Chromebooks, media encoders, and transcoders. He has a master's degree in electronics design from the Indian Institute of Science and a bachelor's degree in electronics and communication from BMS College of Engineering, India. He is an electronics enthusiast and blogger and loves tinkering to create fun DIY projects.

This book has been written with a view to helping you learn the fundamentals of Linux character device driver development in a practical, hands-on fashion, along with the necessary theoretical background to give you a well-rounded view of this vast and interesting topic area. To do the topics justice, that book's scope is deliberately kept limited to (mostly) learning how to write misc class character device drivers on the Linux OS. This way, you will be able to deeply imbibe the fundamental and necessary driver author skills to then be able to tackle different kinds of Linux driver projects with relative ease.

The focus is on hands-on driver development via the powerful Loadable Kernel Module (LKM) framework; the majority of kernel driver development is done in this manner. The focus is kept on working hands-on with driver code, understanding at a sufficiently deep level the internals wherever required, and keeping security in mind.

A recommendation we can't make strongly enough: to really learn and understand the details well, it's really best that you first read and understand this book's companion,Linux Kernel Programming. It covers various key areas building the kernel from source, writing kernel modules via the LKM framework, kernel internals including kernel architecture, the memory system, memory alloc/dealloc APIs, CPU scheduling, and more. The combination of the two books will give you a sure and deep edge.