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

Introduction to device file operations

Operations that you can perform on files depend on the drivers that manage those files. Such operations are defined in the kernel as instances of struct file_operations. struct file_operations exposes a set of callbacks that will handle any user space system call on a file. For example, if you wants users to be able to perform a write on the file representing our device, you must implement the callback corresponding to that write function and add it into the struct file_operations that will be tied to your device. Let's fill in a file operations structure:

struct file_operations { 
    struct module *owner; 
    loff_t (*llseek) (struct file *, loff_t, int); 
    ssize_t (*read) (struct file *, char __user *, size_t, loff_t *); 
    ssize_t (*write) (struct file *, const char __user *, size_t, loff_t *); 
    unsigned int (*poll) (struct...