The Linux API project

This project is a source code repository for instructors or expert programmers who want to explore the Linux C/C++ API. It has about 800 examples (as of 9/2013) I found are useful in explaining the Linux API. The idea is to provide a good coverage of all major features and to resolve disputes about exactly how a certain API works.

Topics covered by the examples

• Multi-threading
• Multi-processing
• Locking
• Calling system calls without C
• Performance
• Coding in assembly
• Various compiler directives
• Many more...

Platforms supported

• i386
• ia64
• Other platforms will be supported if someone is willing to do the work. I usually work on intel 32 bit so I regularly check the code on ia32 and occasionaly use a virtual machine to check that the code works on ia64.

Contributing

This project needs help. fork, commit and request me to pull. Just open a github account, modify and add examples, commit and ask me to pull... A lot of the code is documented but some of it is not. More documentation would be welcome. I would give attribution to whomever contributes.

License

Code is licensed GPL3 and I hold the copyright unless explicity stolen as attributed in the source code. I encourage people to use this source code as aid for instructing courses. Please give me some credit if you do wind up using this package and consider dropping me a note about the fact that you did use the package so I could feel good...

Similar projects

Michael Kerrisk, the maintainer and author of many of the Linux manual pages has a similar project he calls TLPI (The Linux Programming Interface) of programs he used in his book of the same title. You can find it here http://man7.org/tlpi/code/.

Using it

• you need python on your machine: try: python --version if python is missing then: for deb based distributions (debian, ubuntu, ...) do: sudo apt-get install python for rpm based distributions (fedora, redhat, centos,...) do: sudo yum install python

• clone the examples: git clone git@github.com:veltzer/linuxapi.git

• cd into it: cd linuxapi

• install the missing packages and headers needed to compile and run this project ./scripts/ubuntu_install.py

• compile: make

• some of the examples may not compile for you because of missing libraries. Don't worry: you can build each specific example by issuing: make src/examples/performance/cache_misser.elf the name of the elf binary is the same as the example source code with .elf instead of .[c|cc]. You must be at the root of the project to issue the 'make' command.

• the most important part: tweak the examples, try to prove me (my comments) wrong, have fun!

  Mark Veltzer mark.veltzer@gmail.com, 2011-2013