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

Accessing and talking to the client

The SPI I/O model consists of a set of queued messages. We submit one or more struct spi_message structures, which are processed and completed synchronously or asynchronously. A single message consists of one or more structspi_transfer objects, each of which represents a full duplex SPI transfer. These are two main structures to exchange data between the driver and the device. They are both defined in include/linux/spi/spi.h:

SPI message structure

struct spi_transfer represents a full duplex SPI transfer:

struct spi_transfer { 
    const void  *tx_buf; 
    void *rx_buf; 
    unsigned len; 

    dma_addr_t tx_dma; 
    dma_addr_t rx_dma; 
 
    unsigned cs_change:1; 
    unsigned tx_nbits:3; 
    unsigned rx_nbits:3; 
#define  SPI_NBITS_SINGLE   0x01 /* 1bit transfer */ 
#define  SPI_NBITS_DUAL            0x02 /* 2bits transfer */ 
#define...