Creating a FIFO in linux kernel

FIFO is a first in first out data structure that which can be used to hold any kind of data. Linux kernel provides useful APIs to make creation and use of FIFO data structure easy.

The first step in creation of FIFO is to define the FIFO required with the type of data it will be holding using

DEFINE_KFIFO ( fifo,type,size); Where fifo : Name of the fifo to be created type: The datatype of the data to be stored in the fifo. size : The number of elements that the FIFO can hold, it can only be a power of 2.

Once the FIFO has been defined we can use a number of functions available to add,remove, check the FIFO. To put data into the FIFO

kfifo_put (fifo,val); fifo: The fifo to which data needs to be added. val: The data that has to be added to the fifo.

To take the date out of the FIFO

kfifo_get (fifo,val); fifo: The fifo from which data needs to be removed val: The address where the data removed from the FIFO will be stored.

Just to see the above functions in use we will create a proc entry which will output one data from a FIFO that gets created as soon as the module is inserted into the kernel.

To create a module with 6 char entries

#define FIFO_SIZE 6 DEFINE_KFIFO(test,char,FIFO_SIZE);

An array of values to be added to the FIFO

char entries[]={'a','b','c','d','e','f','g','h'};

To add the entries into the FIFO when the module gets inserted into the kernel, the init function needs to call the kfifo_put function

int proc_init (void) { int i=0; create_new_proc_entry(); for(i=0;i<6;i++) kfifo_put(&test,entries[i]); return 0; }

Once the fifo has been created, we can extract one data at a time using the function kfifo_get . To ensure that only one data is read from the FIFO each time we use the cat command on the proc entry extra checks and flags are needed

ssize_t read_proc(struct file *filp,char *buf,size_t count,loff_t *offp ) { int ret,size; char *temp,ch; if(flag==0) { size=0; flag=1; printk(KERN_INFO "in if"); } else { if(kfifo_is_empty(&test)) { temp="FIFO empty"; printk(KERN_INFO "in empty"); size=strlen(temp); simple_read_from_buffer(buf,count,offp,temp,size); } else { ret=kfifo_get(&test,&ch); size=ret; simple_read_from_buffer(buf,count,offp,&ch,size); } flag=flag-1; } if(flag==0) { size=0; flag=1; printk(KERN_INFO "in if"); } else { if(kfifo_is_empty(&test)) { temp="FIFO empty"; size=strlen(temp); simple_read_from_buffer(buf,count,offp,temp,size); } else { ret=kfifo_get(&test,&ch); size=ret; printk(KERN_INFO "in else %d",ret); simple_read_from_buffer(buf,count,offp,&ch,ret); } flag=flag-1; } return size; }

The function kfifo_is_empty returns true when the fifo is empty else it returns false.

The full code for creation of the proc entry called "fifo" which will output one data value at a time is:



If the file is saved as proc_read_fifo.c, it can be compiled using



To test the code, once the compile and insert the code

$ make $ sudo insmod proc_read_fifo.ko

Read the proc entry using the cat command $ cat /proc/fifo a $ cat /proc/fifo b $ cat /proc/fifo c $ cat /proc/fifo d $ cat /proc/fifo e $ cat /proc/fifo f $ cat /proc/fifo FIFO empty

The output shows that every call to read the entry removes one item from the fifo and when all entries are removed "FIFO empty" message gets printed.