Book Image

Linux Device Drivers Development

By : John Madieu
Book Image

Linux Device Drivers Development

By: John Madieu

Overview of this book

Linux kernel is a complex, portable, modular and widely used piece of software, running on around 80% of servers and embedded systems in more than half of devices throughout the World. Device drivers play a critical role in how well a Linux system performs. As Linux has turned out to be one of the most popular operating systems used, the interest in developing proprietary device drivers is also increasing steadily. This book will initially help you understand the basics of drivers as well as prepare for the long journey through the Linux Kernel. This book then covers drivers development based on various Linux subsystems such as memory management, PWM, RTC, IIO, IRQ management, and so on. The book also offers a practical approach on direct memory access and network device drivers. By the end of this book, you will be comfortable with the concept of device driver development and will be in a position to write any device driver from scratch using the latest kernel version (v4.13 at the time of writing this book).
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Introduction to Kernel Development

DMA – Direct Memory Access

DMA is a feature of computer systems that allows devices to access the main system memory RAM without CPU intervention, which then allows them to devote themselves to other tasks. One typically uses it for accelerating network traffic, but it supports any kind of copy.

The DMA controller is the peripheral responsible for DMA management. One mostly finds it in modern processors and microcontrollers. DMA is a feature used to perform memory read and write operations without stealing CPU cycles. When one needs to transfer a block of data, the processor feeds the DMA controller with the source and destination addresses and the total number of bytes. The DMA controller then transfers the data from the source to the destination automatically, without stealing CPU cycles. When the number of bytes remaining reaches zero, the block transfer ends.

In this...