CS 635

Advanced Systems Programming

Spring 2003
Professor Allan B. Cruse
University of San Francisco
 Instructor Contact Information
• Office: Harney Science Center – 212
• Hours: Mon-Wed 2:30pm-4:00pm
• Phone: (415) 422-6562
• Email: cruse@usfca.edu

• Webpage: nexus.cs.usfca.edu/~cruse/
 Course Textbooks
Alessandro Rubini and Jonathan Corbet,
Linux Device Drivers (Second Edition), O’Reilly &
Associates, Incorporated (2001)

M. Beck et al, Linux Kernel Programming (Third Edition),

Addison-Wesley (2002)

Alessandro Rubini and Jonathan Corbet, & Greg Kroah-

Hartman
Linux Device Drivers (Thrid Edition) , O'Reilly &
Associates, Incorporated (2005)
 Linux kernel modules
• Great mechanism for kernel ‘extensibility’
• Neat tool for studying how kernel works
• Kernel can be modified while it’s running
• Unnecessary to recompile and then reboot
• But inherently unsafe: bugs cause system
crashes!
 ‘Extensibility’
• Modern OS needs ability to evolve
• Will need to support new devices
• Will need to allow ‘bugs’ to be fixed
• Will need to permit performance gains

• Otherwise: suffer early obsolescence!

 Two Extensibility Mechanisms

• ‘Open Source’ programming

• ‘Installable’ kernel modules

 ‘Superuser’ privileges
• Modifying a running kernel is ‘risky’

• Only authorized ‘system administrators’

are allowed to install kernel modules
 A few ‘/proc’ examples
• $ cat /proc/version
• $ cat /proc/cpuinfo
• $ cat /proc/modules
• $ cat /proc/iomem
• $ cat /proc/self/maps
 Module structure
• Two ‘module administration’ functions
plus
• Appropriate ‘module service’ functions
Required module functions ver 2.4
• int init_module( void );
• // gets called during module installation

• void cleanup_module( void );

• // gets called during module removal
 Required module functions ver 2.6
• Does not mandate the use of “init_module”
and “cleanup_module” function names
• If those names are not used then
module_init() and module_exit() macros
must be used to indicate the init and
cleanup function respectively
– Example
• module_init(jiffies_init);
• module_exit(jiffies_exit);
 How to compile a module
• gcc –c –O mod.c (ver 2.4)
• For compiling in kernel ver 2.6 Makefile
must contain the following entry
– obj-m := mod.o

• Compile using the following command

– make -C /lib/modules/`uname -r`/build M=`pwd` modules
• Creates a large number of files of which the final
kernel object file to be loaded is with .ko
extension
Using ‘insmod’ and ‘rmmod’

root# /sbin/insmod jiffies.ko

root# /sbin/rmmod jiffies

Using the ‘sudo’ command

user$ sudo /sbin/insmod jiffies.ko

user$ sudo /sbin/rmmod jiffies

 jiffies
• unsigned long volatile jiffies;
• global kernel variable (used by scheduler)
• Initialized to zero when system reboots
• Gets incremented when timer interrupts
• So it counts ‘clock-ticks’ since cpu restart
• ‘tick-frequency’ is architecture dependent
• Must include “linux/jiffies.h” header file
 jiffies overflow
• Won’t overflow for at least 16 months
• Linux recently modified to ‘fix’ overflow
• New declaration in ‘linux/sched.h’:
unsigned long long jiffies_64;
and a new instruction in ‘do_timer()’
(*(u64*)&jiffies_64)++;
which compiles to assembly language as
add $1, jiffies+0
adc $0, jiffies+4