C Fundamentals for Kernel Engineering: Mastering Concurrency, Memory, and Performance Optimization in Modern Kernel-Level C - Softcover

Gates, Cecil

Softcover

ISBN 13: 9798282685039

Publisher: Independently published, 2025

Synopsis

From the first line of code that touches page tables to the last atomic instruction guarding a lock-free queue, this definitive guide lifts the curtain on exactly how professional kernel developers write, debug, and harden C at the heart of every modern operating system. It condenses years of real-world expertise into a relentlessly practical reference packed with production-grade patterns, compiler wizardry, and concurrency strategies you can drop straight into your own low-level projects.

What You’ll Unlock Inside

• High-Performance Memory Mastery – page allocator APIs, NUMA-aware placement, zero-copy buffers, and cache-line padding techniques that squeeze every cycle from today’s multicore CPUs.
• Rock-Solid Concurrency Toolkits – spinlocks, seqlocks, RCU, atomic operations, and preemption control woven into hands-on examples that stay fast and deadlock-free.
• Cutting-Edge Optimization Secrets – branch prediction hints, static keys, jump labels, and compile-time assertions used by top-tier maintainers to ship code that never slows down.
• Lock-Free & Wait-Free Algorithms – build ultra-scalable stacks, queues, and ring buffers with detailed, step-by-step reasoning about memory ordering and data-race safety.
• Instrumentation & Observability – tracepoints, eBPF helpers, and live-patch-safe patterns that turn production kernels into live laboratories—without compromising performance.
• Secure, Future-Proof Engineering – integer overflow guards, sanitizer annotations, and hot-patch-ready data access strategies that make your code resilient to both bugs and CVEs.

Each of the 99 laser-focused chapters drills into a single cornerstone concept—just enough theory to ground you, then straight into listings, idioms, and battle-tested checklists that stick.

Perfect For

• Systems programmers advancing from user-space to kernel-space.
• Embedded engineers chasing deterministic performance on constrained hardware.
• Security researchers auditing close-to-metal C.
• DevOps professionals exploring eBPF observability and live patching.
• Computer science students seeking a career-ready jump start into operating-system internals.

If you’re comfortable in C and hungry for the power that lives beneath libc, this book hands you the keys.

Edition details

• Publisher: Independently published
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 13: 9798282685039
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 671