Book Image

Linux Device Driver Development Cookbook

By : Rodolfo Giometti
Book Image

Linux Device Driver Development Cookbook

By: Rodolfo Giometti

Overview of this book

Linux is a unified kernel that is widely used to develop embedded systems. As Linux has turned out to be one of the most popular operating systems worldwide, the interest in developing proprietary device drivers has also increased. Device drivers play a critical role in how the system performs and ensure that the device works in the manner intended. By exploring several examples on the development of character devices, the technique of managing a device tree, and how to use other kernel internals, such as interrupts, kernel timers, and wait queue, you’ll be able to add proper management for custom peripherals to your embedded system. You’ll begin by installing the Linux kernel and then configuring it. Once you have installed the system, you will learn to use different kernel features and character drivers. You will also cover interrupts in-depth and understand how you can manage them. Later, you will explore the kernel internals required for developing applications. As you approach the concluding chapters, you will learn to implement advanced character drivers and also discover how to write important Linux device drivers. By the end of this book, you will be equipped with the skills you need to write a custom character driver and kernel code according to your requirements.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
10
Additional Information: Managing Interrupts and Concurrency

Accessing I/O memory with mmap()

In this recipe, we will see how to map an I/O memory region within the process memory space to gain access to our peripheral's internal by simply using a pointer in memory.

Getting ready

Now, let's see how we can implement a custom mmap() system call for our chrdev driver.

Since we have a virtual device totally mapped into memory, we may suppose that the buf buffer within struct chrdev_device represents the memory areas to be mapped. Also, we need to dynamically allocate it for it to be remapped; this is due to the fact that kernel virtual memory addresses cannot be remapped using the remap_pfn_range() function.

This is the only limitation of remap_pfn_range(), which is unable to...