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 Kernel Development

Linux started as a hobby project in 1991 for a Finnish student, Linus Torvalds. The project has gradually grown and still does, with roughly 1,000 contributors around the world. Nowadays, Linux is a must, in embedded systems as well as on servers. A kernel is a center part of an operating system, and its development is not so obvious.

Linux offers many advantages over other operating systems:

  • It is free of charge
  • Well documented with a large community
  • Portable across different platforms
  • Provides access to the source code
  • Lots of free open source software

This book tries to be as generic as possible. There is a special topic, device tree, which is not a full x86 feature yet. That topic will then be dedicated to ARM processors, and all those fully supporting the device tree. Why those architectures? Because they are most used on desktop and servers (for x86), and on embedded systems (ARM).

This chapter deals, among other things, with:

  • Development environment setup
  • Getting, configuring, and building kernel sources
  • Kernel source code organization
  • Introduction to kernel coding style