The Linux Programmer's Toolbox

by Fusco, John

• ISBN13: 9780132198578
• ISBN10: 0132198576
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-03-06
• Publisher: Prentice Hall

Summary

A hands-on, example-rich, practical guide to the complex and often confusing world of software development tools for Linux developers.

Author Biography

John Fusco is a software developer for GE Healthcare who specializes in Linux applications and device drivers. He has worked on Unix software for more than ten years and has been developing applications for Linux since kernel version 2.0. He has written articles for Embedded Systems Programming and Linux Journal.

Table of Contents

Foreword	p. xvii
Preface	p. xix
Acknowledgments	p. xxiii
About the Author	p. xxv
Downloading and Installing Open Source Tools	p. 1
Introduction	p. 1
What Is Open Source?	p. 2
What Does Open Source Mean to You?	p. 2
An Introduction to Archive Files	p. 4
Know Your Package Manager	p. 12
Some Words about Security and Packages	p. 17
Inspecting Package Contents	p. 27
Keeping Packages up to Date	p. 33
Summary	p. 39
Building from Source	p. 41
Introduction	p. 41
Build Tools	p. 41
The Build Process	p. 74
Understanding Errors and Warnings	p. 78
Summary	p. 100
Finding Help	p. 103
Introduction	p. 103
Online Help Tools	p. 103
Other Places to Look	p. 120
Documentation Formats	p. 124
Internet Sources of Information	p. 131
Finding Information about the Linux Kernel	p. 134
Summary	p. 138
Editing and Maintaining Source Files	p. 141
Introduction	p. 141
The Text Editor	p. 142
Revision Control	p. 189
Source Code Beautifiers and Browsers	p. 203
Summary	p. 216
What Every Developer Should Know about the Kernel	p. 221
Introduction	p. 221
User Mode versus Kernel Mode	p. 222
The Process Scheduler	p. 226
Understanding Devices and Device Drivers	p. 257
The I/O Scheduler	p. 282
Memory Management in User Space	p. 286
Summary	p. 315
Understanding Processes	p. 317
Introduction	p. 317
Where Processes Come From	p. 317
The exec Functions	p. 320
Process Synchronization with wait	p. 327
The Process Footprint	p. 329
Setting Process Limits	p. 340
Processes and procfs	p. 343
Tools for Managing Processes	p. 346
Summary	p. 355
Communication between Processes	p. 357
Introduction	p. 357
IPC Using Plain Files	p. 358
Shared Memory	p. 363
Signals	p. 370
Pipes	p. 381
Sockets	p. 382
Message Queues	p. 393
Semaphores	p. 402
Summary	p. 412
Debugging IPC with Shell Commands	p. 415
Introduction	p. 415
Tools for Working with Open Files	p. 415
Dumping Data from a File	p. 420
Shell Tools for System V IPC	p. 426
Tools for Working with POSIX IPC	p. 431
Tools for Working with Signals	p. 434
Tools for Working with Pipes and Sockets	p. 437
Using Inodes to Identify Files and IPC Objects	p. 440
Summary	p. 442
Performance Tuning	p. 445
Introduction	p. 445
System Performance	p. 445
Application Performance	p. 475
Multiprocessor Performance	p. 501
Summary	p. 509
Debugging	p. 513
Introduction	p. 513
The Most Basic Debugging Tool: printf	p. 514
Getting Comfortable with the GNU Debugger: gdb	p. 529
Debugging Shared Objects	p. 561
Looking for Memory Issues	p. 569
Unconventional Techniques	p. 583
Summary	p. 594
Index	p. 597
Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Linux has no shortage of tools. Many are inherited from Unix, with cryptic two-letter names that conjure up images of developers trying to preserve space on a punch card. Happily, those days are long gone, but the legacy remains. Many of those old tools are still quite useful. Most are highly specialized. Each may do only one thing but does it very well. Highly specialized tools often have many options that can make them intimidating to use. Consider the first time you used grepand learned what a regular expression was. Perhaps you haven't mastered regular expression syntax yet (don't worry; no one else has, either). That's not important, because you don't need to be a master of regular expressions to put grep to good use. If there's one thing that I hope you learn from this book, it's that there are many tools out there that you can use without having to master them. You don't need to invest an enormous amount of time reading manuals before you can be productive. I hope you will discover new tools that you may not have been familiar with. Some of the tools this book looks at are quite old and some are new. All of them are useful. As you learn more about each tool, you will find more uses for it. I use the term tool loosely in this book. To me, creating tools is as important as using tools, so I have included various APIs that are not usually covered in much detail in other books. In addition, this book provides some background on the internal workings of the Linux kernel that are necessary to understand what some tools are trying to tell you. I present a unique perspective on the kernel: the user's point of view. You will find enough information to allow you to understand the ground rules that the kernel sets for every process, and I promise you will not have to read a single line of kernel source code. What you will not find in this book is reconstituted man pages or other documentation stitched into the text. The GNU and Linux developers have done a great job of documenting their work, but that documentation can be hard to find for the inexperienced user. Rather than reprint documentation that will be out of date by the time you read this, I show you some ingenious ways to find the most up-to-date documentation. GNU/Linux documentation is abundant, but it's not always easy to read. You can read a 10,000-word document for a tool and still not have a clue what the tool does or how to use it. This is where I have tried to fill in the missing pieces. I have tried to explain not just how to use each tool, but also why you would want to use it. Wherever possible, I have provided simple, brief examples that you can type and modify yourself to enhance your understanding of the tools and Linux itself. What all the tools in this book have in common is that they are available at no cost. Most come with standard Linux distributions, and for those that may not, I have included URLs so that you can download them yourself. As much as possible, I tried to keep the material interesting and fun. Who Should Read This Book This book is written for intermediate to advanced Linux programmers who wish to become more productive and gain a better understanding of the Linux programming environment. If you're an experienced Windows programmer who feels like a fish out of water in the Linux environment, then this book is for you, too. Non-programmers should also find this book useful because many of the tools and topics I cover have applications beyond programming. If you are a system administrator, or just a Linux enthusiast, then there's something for you in this book, too. The Purpose of This Book I wrote this book as a follow-up to an article I wrote for the Linux Journal entitled "Ten Commands Every Linux Developer Should Know." The inspiration for this article came from my own experience as a Linux programmer. In my daily work I make it a point to invest some of my ti