Mastering Assembly Programming

LKM structure

Let me save you from going the same long way of digging for information, reversing the structure of other kernel modules and examining kernel sources in order to see how exactly a module is loaded. Instead, let us proceed directly to the structure of an LKM.

A loadable kernel module is, in fact, an ELF object file with a few additional sections and some information, which we neither meet in object files nor in executables created for user-space. We should point out at least five sections that we do not usually have in regular files:

• .init.text: This section contains all the code required for module initialization. In terms of Windows, for example, the content of this section may be compared to the DllMain() function and all ...