Linux Kernel and Device Driver Development Training

• Work on process management
• Learn process management by understanding multitasking, Linux process scheduler policy, and scheduling algorithms
• Understand the significance and types of system calls
• Proper usage of memory management
• Detailed understanding of Virtual File System, interrupt handlers, and time management
• Writing device driver programs
• Idea of Real Time operating System (RTOS)

• Students from third and fourth year of BE / B. Tech. courses (Computers, Electronics, Electronics & Telecommunication, Instrumentation, Computer Science, Information Technology).
• Final year students of MCA/BCA/M.Sc-IT/M.Tech
• Working professionals from embedded systems and related domains.
• Professionals willing to develop device driver programming skills.

1. Process Management (kernel side) 

• The Process
• Process Descriptor and the Task Structure
• Allocating the Process Descriptor
• Storing the Process Descriptor
• Process State
• Manipulating the Current Process State
• Process Context
• Copy-on-Write
• Forking
• vfork()
• Kernel Threads

2. Process Scheduling

• Multitasking
• Linux’s Process Scheduler Policy
  • I/O-Bound Versus Processor-Bound Processes
  • Process Priority
  • Time slice
  • The Scheduling Policy in Action
• The Linux Scheduling Algorithm
  • Scheduler Classes
  • Process Scheduling in Unix Systems
  • Fair Scheduling
• The Scheduler Entry Point
• Wait Queues
• Waking Up
• Preemption and Context Switching

3. System Calls

• System Calls
• Examples of system calls
• Examples of Standard APIs
• System call Implementation
• API-system Call-OS relationship
• Types of system calls
• Processor Affinity System Calls
• Yielding Processor Time
• Communicating with the Kernel
• APIs, POSIX, and the C Library
• Accessing the System Call from User-Space

4. Memory Management

• Pages
• Zones
• Getting Pages
• Getting Zeroed Pages
• Freeing Pages
• kmalloc()
• gfp_mask Flags
• Action Modifiers
• Zone Modifiers
• Type Flags
• kfree()
• vmalloc()
• Slab Layer
• Design of the Slab Layer
• Slab Allocator Interface
• Allocating from the Cache
• The Process Address Space

5. The Virtual File system

• Common File system Interface
• File system Abstraction Layer
• Unix File systems
• VFS Objects and Their Data Structures
• The Superblock Object
• Superblock Operations
• The Inode Object
• Inode Operations
• The Dentry Object
• The File Object
• File Operations
• Data Structures Associated with File systems
• Data Structures Associated with a Process

6. Interrupts and Interrupt Handlers                                                              

• Top Halves verses Bottom Halves
• Registering an interrupt handler
• Interrupt context
• Taslets
• Softirq

7. An Introduction to Kernel Synchronization

• Kernel Synchronization Methods
• Spin locks
• Reader-writer locks
• Semaphores

8. Timers and Time Management

• Jiffies
• Hardware clocks and timers

9. LINUX DEVICE DRIVER

• Introduction
• Role of Device Driver
• types of Device driver
• loadable modules and its benefits
• Functions used to load and unload modules
• Passing parameters to a loadable module

10. Writing a device Driver Program

• Important header files
• Writing a simple module
• Compiling and loading modules
• Device information in /proc
• Character driver
• character driver basics
• major and minor numbers
• creating device files with mknod
• registering a character device driver
• Hand- on   Practice                                          
• Character Device Driver writing
• Userspace interaction
• Proc/sys model
• Lcd implementation
• Understanding the serial device driver

11. RTOS

• Introduction to RTOS
• What is Real Time System?
• Requirements of Real time System
• Hard Real-time Systems and Soft Real-time Systems

12. Task

• What is a task creation?
• Unitask approach Vs multitask approach
• Task states

13. Scheduling

• Multitasking Kernel
• Context switch
• Priority based scheduling
• Round Robin scheduling

14. Task functions

• Task states  
• Task hooks
• Task synchronization