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

Representing and addressing devices

Each device is given at least one node in the DT. Some properties are common to many device types, especially devices sitting on a bus known to the kernel (SPI, I2C, platform, MDIO, and so on). These properties are reg, #address-cells, and #size-cells. The purpose of these properties is device addressing on the bus they sit on. That said, the main addressing property is reg, which is a generic property whose meaning depends on the bus the device sits on. The # (sharp) that prefixes size-cell and address-cell can be translated into length.

Each addressable device gets a reg property that is a list of tuples in the form reg = <address0size0 [address1size1] [address2size2] ... >, where each tuple represents an address range used by the device. #size-cells indicates how many 32-bit cells are used to represent size, and may be 0 if size is...