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

PWM controller driver

As you need struct gpio_chip when writing GPIO-controller drivers and struct irq_chip when writing IRQ-controller drivers, a PWM controller is represented in the kernel as an instance of the struct pwm_chip structure:

PWM controller and devices
struct pwm_chip { 
   struct device *dev; 
   const struct pwm_ops *ops; 
   int base; 
   unsigned int npwm; 
 
   struct pwm_device *pwms; 
   struct pwm_device * (*of_xlate)(struct pwm_chip *pc, 
                    const struct of_phandle_args *args); 
   unsigned int of_pwm_n_cells; 
   bool can_sleep; 
}; 

The following is the meaning of each element in the structure:

  • dev: This represents the device associated with this chip.
  • Ops: This is a data structure providing callback functions this chip exposes to consumer drivers.
  • Base: This is the number of the first PWM controlled by this chip. If chip->base...