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

Driver data structures

The framebuffer drivers depend heavily on four data structures, all defined in include/linux/fb.h, which is also the header you should include in your code in order to deal with framebuffer drivers:

#include <linux/fb.h> 

These structures are fb_var_screeninfo, fb_fix_screeninfo, fb_cmap, and fb_info. The first three are made available to and from the user space code. Now let us describe the purpose of each structure, their meaning, and what they are used for:

  1. The kernel uses an instance of struct struct fb_var_screeninfo to hold variable properties of the video card. These values are those defined by the user, such as resolution depth:
struct fb_var_screeninfo { 
   __u32 xres; /* visible resolution */ 
   __u32 yres; 
 
   __u32 xres_virtual; /* virtual resolution */ 
   __u32 yres_virtual; 
 
   __u32 xoffset; /* offset from virtual to visible...