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

The Concept of Device Tree

The Device Tree (DT) is an easy-to-read hardware description file, with a JSON-like formatting style, which is a simple tree structure where devices are represented by nodes with their properties. Properties can be either empty (just the key, to describe Boolean values), or key-value pairs where the value can contain an arbitrary byte stream. This chapter is a simple introduction to the DT. Every kernel subsystem or framework has its own DT binding. We will talk about those specific bindings when we deal with concerned topics. The DT originated from OF, which is a standard endorsed by computer companies, and whose main purpose is defining interfaces for computer firmware systems. That said, you can find more on DT specification at http://www.devicetree.org/. This chapter will cover the basics of DT, such as:

  • Naming conventions, as well as aliases...