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This appendix lists the major data structures that Linux uses and which are described in this book. They have been edited slightly to fit the paper.

 

block_dev_struct

block_dev_struct data structures are used to register block devices as available for use by the buffer cache. They are held together in the blk_dev vector.

 

struct blk_dev_struct {
    void (*request_fn)(void);
    struct request * current_request;
    struct request   plug;
    struct tq_struct plug_tq;
};

This chapter describes where in the Linux kernel sources you should start looking for particular kernel functions.

This book does not depend on a knowledge of the 'C' programming language or require that you have the Linux kernel sources available in order to understand how the Linux kernel works. That said, it is a fruitful exercise to look at the kernel sources to get an in-depth understanding of the Linux operating system. This chapter gives an overview of the kernel sources; how they are arranged and where you might start to look for particular code.

 

Where to Get The Linux Kernel Sources

All of the major Linux distributions ( Craftworks, Debian, Slackware, Red Hat etcetera) include the kernel sources in them. Usually the Linux kernel that got installed on your Linux system was built from those sources. By their very nature these sources tend to be a little out of date so you may want to get the latest sources from one of the web sites mentioned in chapter  www-appendix. They are kept on ftp://ftp.cs.helsinki.fi and all of the other web sites shadow them. This makes the Helsinki web site the most up to date, but sites like MIT and Sunsite are never very far behind.

If you do not have access to the web, there are many CD ROM vendors who offer snapshots of the world's major web sites at a very reasonable cost. Some even offer a subscription service with quarterly or even monthly updates. Your local Linux User Group is also a good source of sources.

This chapter describes how the Linux kernel can dynamically load functions, for example filesystems, only when they are needed.

Linux is a monolithic kernel; that is, it is one, single, large program where all the functional components of the kernel have access to all of its internal data structures and routines. The alternative is to have a micro-kernel structure where the functional pieces of the kernel are broken out into separate units with strict communication mechanisms between them. This makes adding new components into the kernel via the configuration process rather time consuming. Say you wanted to use a SCSI driver for an NCR 810 SCSI and you had not built it into the kernel. You would have to configure and then build a new kernel before you could use the NCR 810. There is an alternative, Linux allows you to dynamically load and unload components of the operating system as you need them. Linux modules are lumps of code that can be dynamically linked into the kernel at any point after the system has booted. They can be unlinked from the kernel and removed when they are no longer needed. Mostly Linux kernel modules are device drivers, pseudo-device drivers such as network drivers, or file-systems.

You can either load and unload Linux kernel modules explicitly using the insmod and rmmod commands or the kernel itself can demand that the kernel daemon (kerneld) loads and unloads the modules as they are needed.

This chapter describes some of the general tasks and mechanisms that the Linux kernel needs to supply so that other parts of the kernel work effectively together.

 

11.1 Bottom Half Handling

 

 

Figure 11.1: Bottom Half Handling Data Structures

 

There are often times in a kernel when you do not want to do work at this moment. A good example of this is during interrupt processing. When the interrupt was asserted, the processor stopped what it was doing and the operating system delivered the interrupt to the appropriate device driver. Device drivers should not spend too much time handling interrupts as, during this time, nothing else in the system can run. There is often some work that could just as well be done later on. Linux's bottom half handlers were invented so that device drivers and other parts of the Linux kernel could queue work to be done later on. Figure  11.1 shows the kernel data structures associated with bottom half handling.

One of the purposes of an operating system is to hide the peculiarities of the system's hardware devices from its users. For example the Virtual File System presents a uniform view of the mounted filesystems irrespective of the underlying physical devices. This chapter describes how the Linux kernel manages the physical devices in the system.

The CPU is not the only intelligent device in the system, every physical device has its own hardware controller. The keyboard, mouse and serial ports are controlled by a SuperIO chip, the IDE disks by an IDE controller, SCSI disks by a SCSI controller and so on. Each hardware controller has its own control and status registers (CSRs) and these differ between devices. The CSRs for an Adaptec 2940 SCSI controller are completely different from those of an NCR 810 SCSI controller. The CSRs are used to start and stop the device, to initialize it and to diagnose any problems with it. Instead of putting code to manage the hardware controllers in the system into every application, the code is kept in the Linux kernel. The software that handles or manages a hardware controller is known as a device driver. The Linux kernel device drivers are, essentially, a shared library of privileged, memory resident, low level hardware handling routines. It is Linux's device drivers that handle the peculiarities of the devices they are managing.