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

Locking with the process context

In this recipe, we will see how to protect data against the concurrent access of two or more processes to avoid race conditions.

How to do it...

To present a simple example about how to add a mutex to the chrdev driver, we can make a few modifications to it, as reported in the following.

  1. First, we have to add the mux mutex to the driver's main structure in the chrdev.h header file, as follows:
/* Main struct */
struct chrdev_device {
char label[NAME_LEN];
unsigned int busy : 1;
char *buf;
int read_only;

unsigned int id;
struct module *owner;
struct cdev cdev;
struct device *dev;

struct mutex mux;
};
All modifications presented here can be applied to the chrdev...