Linux System Programming

Linux for Programmers

• Linux standards and compatibility
• System calls
• Privilege mode – how does it works
• Utilities and system limits
• How to get help – man pages, commands help
• Tools – make , cross compile tools

Working with files

• File descriptors
• Opening and closing files
• Reading and writing files
• File status and the inode
• Mapping files
• dup and dup2
• Creating directories
• FILE* APIs
• Symbolic links
• Poll/select/epoll
• Passing file descriptors between processes

Introduction to Processes

• What is in a process?
• Memory protection
• Process ids, and parent relationship
• Startup and shutdown
• Resource limits
• The process address space
• Virtual and physical memory
• The Linux scheduler
• Creating process – fork/vfork
• Priorities
• Wait* , signalfd and multiplexing
• Fork and exec*
• Process return value
• Adoption
• Zombies and solutions
• System(3)
• Process groups, sessions
• Best practices and common patterns

Posix Threads

• Thread overview
• Creating and controlling threads
• Threads attributes
• Canceling threads
• Thread local storage

Memory allocation

• malloc
• mmap
• Custom allocators
• Obstacks
• Allocating on the stack (alloca(3) and C99 stack allocation) 

Synchronization Objects

• Posix mutex
• Mutex attributes
• Futex
• Priority inheritance
• Using reader-writer locks
• Using condition variables
• Avoiding deadlocks
• POSIX semaphores
• POSIX Shared memory
• SYS V IPC – and why we should avoid it
• Barriers and multicore issues
• Atomic operations

Pipes and FIFOs

• Creating pipes
• Working with pipes
• Popen(3)
• Named pipes (FIFOs)
• Working with named pipes

Signals

• What is a signal?
• Signal vs Interrupt
• Reacting to a signal
• Signal masks and signal sets
• Writing a signal handler
• signalfd
• Alarm, and interval timers
• How signal implemented (user/kernel)

Sockets

• Domain and socket types
• Using datagram sockets
• Using stream sockets
• UNIX domain socket APIs
• Internet domain sockets
• Hosts, addresses, and ports
• Byte ordering
• IPv4 and IPv6
• Internet domain socket APIs
• Raw sockets
• Direct access to network device

IO Subsystem

• IO overview
• Kernel page cache
• IO Schedulers
• ionice , ioprio_set
• Using O_DIRECT

Zero Copy

• Overview
• sendfile
• pipe
• splice
• tee
• vmsplice
• Other tools 

Application debugging

• Toolchain overview
• Pre-processing info
• Symbols, name mangling
• Debugging information
• ELF format and tools
• Using GDB
• Debugging with eclipse
• DDD
• Remote debugging
• GDB automation
• Debugging with core dumps
• Writing fault handlers
• Other tools for debugging, tracing and profile