Summary
Congratulations on completing this chapter!
Understanding concurrency and its related concerns is absolutely critical for any software professional. In this chapter, you learned key concepts regarding critical sections, the need for exclusive execution within them, and what atomicity and data races really mean. You then learned why we need to be concerned with concurrency while writing code for the Linux OS. After that, we delved into two very common locking technologies that are heavily used in the kernel – mutex locks and spinlocks – in detail. You also learned how to decide which lock to use when. Finally, and again, importantly, learning how to handle concurrency concerns when hardware interrupts (and their possible bottom halves) are in play was covered.
But we aren’t done with kernel concurrency yet! There are many more concepts and technologies we need to learn about, which is just what we will do in the next, and final, chapter of this...
