2.2. The Hello World Module

Many programming books begin with a "hello world" example as a way of showing the simplest possible program. This book deals in kernel modules rather than programs; so, for the impatient reader, the following code is a complete "hello world" module:

#include <linux/init.h>
#include <linux/module.h>
MODULE_LICENSE("Dual BSD/GPL");

static int hello_init(void)
{
    printk(KERN_ALERT "Hello, world\n");
    return 0;
}

static void hello_exit(void)
{
    printk(KERN_ALERT "Goodbye, cruel world\n");
}

module_init(hello_init);
module_exit(hello_exit);

This module defines two functions, one to be invoked when the module is loaded into the kernel (hello_init) and one for when the module is removed (hello_exit). The module_init and module_exit lines use special kernel macros to indicate the role of these two functions. Another special macro (MODULE_LICENSE) is used to tell the kernel that this module bears a free license; without such a declaration, the kernel complains when the module is loaded.

The printk function is defined in the Linux kernel and made available to modules; it behaves similarly to the standard C library function printf. The kernel needs its own printing function because it runs by itself, without the help of the C library. The module can call printk because, after insmod has loaded it, the module is linked to the kernel and can access the kernel's public symbols (functions and variables, as detailed in the next section). The string KERN_ALERT is the priority of the message.^[1] We've specified a high priority in this module, because a message with the default priority might not show up anywhere useful, depending on the kernel version you are running, the version of the klogd daemon, and your configuration. You can ignore this issue for now; we explain it in Chapter 4.

^[1] The priority is just a string, such as <1>, which is prepended to the printk format string. Note the lack of a comma after KERN_ALERT; adding a comma there is a common and annoying typo (which, fortunately, is caught by the compiler).

You can test the module with the insmod and rmmod utilities, as shown below. Note that only the superuser can load and unload a module.

% make
make[1]: Entering directory `/usr/src/linux-2.6.10'
  CC [M]  /home/ldd3/src/misc-modules/hello.o
  Building modules, stage 2.
  MODPOST
  CC      /home/ldd3/src/misc-modules/hello.mod.o
  LD [M]  /home/ldd3/src/misc-modules/hello.ko
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/linux-2.6.10'
% su
root# insmod ./hello.ko
Hello, world
root# rmmod hello
Goodbye cruel world
root#

Please note once again that, for the above sequence of commands to work, you must have a properly configured and built kernel tree in a place where the makefile is able to find it (/usr/src/linux-2.6.10 in the example shown). We get into the details of how modules are built in Section 2.4.

According to the mechanism your system uses to deliver the message lines, your output may be different. In particular, the previous screen dump was taken from a text console; if you are running insmod and rmmod from a terminal emulator running under the window system, you won't see anything on your screen. The message goes to one of the system log files, such as /var/log/messages (the name of the actual file varies between Linux distributions). The mechanism used to deliver kernel messages is described in Chapter 4.

As you can see, writing a module is not as difficult as you might expect—at least, as long as the module is not required to do anything worthwhile. The hard part is understanding your device and how to maximize performance. We go deeper into modularization throughout this chapter and leave device-specific issues for later chapters.