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

Network Interface Card Drivers

We all know that networking is inherent to the Linux kernel. Some years ago, Linux was only used for its network performances, but things have changed now; Linux is much more than a server, and runs on billions of embedded devices. Through the years, Linux gained the reputation of being the best network operating system. In spite of all this, Linux cannot do everything. Given the huge variety of Ethernet controllers that exist, Linux has found no other way than to expose an API to developers who need a writing driver for their network device, or who need to perform kernel networking development in a general manner. This API offers a sufficient abstraction layer, allowing for guaranteeing the generosity of the developed code, as well as porting on other architectures. This chapter will simply walk through the part of this API that deals with Network...