Subsystems

Subsystems represent high-level concepts in the kernel and are a collection of one or more ksets. Whereas ksets contain kobjects, subsystems contain ksets, but the relationship between ksets in a subsystem is much weaker than the relationship between kobjects in a kset. The ksets in a subsystem may share only some large overarching generalization.

Despite this important role, subsystems are represented by a rather simple object, struct subsystem:

struct subsystem {
        struct kset             kset;
        struct rw_semaphore     rwsem;
};

Whereas the subsystem structure only points to a single kset, multiple ksets may point to a single subsystem via their subsys pointer. This unidirectional relationship implies that it is not possible to find all ksets in a subsystem given only a subsystem structure.

The kset that is contained in the subsystem is the default kset of that subsystem, used to cement the subsystem's location in the object hierarchy.

The rwsem member of the subsystem structure is a read-write semaphore (see Chapter 9, "Kernel Synchronization Methods") used to protect against concurrent access of this subsystem and all its ksets. All ksets must belong to a subsystem because they use this read-write semaphore to synchronize access to their internal data.