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

LDM data structures

The goal is to build a complete DT that will map each physical device present on the system, and introduce their hierarchy. One common and generic structure has been created to represent any object that could be a part of the device model. The upper level of LDM relies on the bus represented in the kernel as an instance of struct bus_type; the device driver, represented by a struct device_driver structure, and the device, which is the last element represented as an instance of the struct device structure. In this section, we will design a bus driver packt bus, in order to get deep into LDM data structures and mechanisms.

The bus

A bus is a channel link between devices and processors. The hardware entity...