Book Image

Linux Kernel Programming Part 2 - Char Device Drivers and Kernel Synchronization

By : Kaiwan N. Billimoria
Book Image

Linux Kernel Programming Part 2 - Char Device Drivers and Kernel Synchronization

By: Kaiwan N. Billimoria

Overview of this book

Linux Kernel Programming Part 2 - Char Device Drivers and Kernel Synchronization is an ideal companion guide to the Linux Kernel Programming book. This book provides a comprehensive introduction for those new to Linux device driver development and will have you up and running with writing misc class character device driver code (on the 5.4 LTS Linux kernel) in next to no time. You'll begin by learning how to write a simple and complete misc class character driver before interfacing your driver with user-mode processes via procfs, sysfs, debugfs, netlink sockets, and ioctl. You'll then find out how to work with hardware I/O memory. The book covers working with hardware interrupts in depth and helps you understand interrupt request (IRQ) allocation, threaded IRQ handlers, tasklets, and softirqs. You'll also explore the practical usage of useful kernel mechanisms, setting up delays, timers, kernel threads, and workqueues. Finally, you'll discover how to deal with the complexity of kernel synchronization with locking technologies (mutexes, spinlocks, and atomic/refcount operators), including more advanced topics such as cache effects, a primer on lock-free techniques, deadlock avoidance (with lockdep), and kernel lock debugging techniques. By the end of this Linux kernel book, you'll have learned the fundamentals of writing Linux character device driver code for real-world projects and products.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)
1
Section 1: Character Device Driver Basics
3
User-Kernel Communication Pathways
5
Handling Hardware Interrupts
6
Working with Kernel Timers, Threads, and Workqueues
7
Section 2: Delving Deeper

The code for implementing our sysfs file and its callbacks

Let's look at the relevant parts of the code for our simple sysfs interfacing driver and try things out, step by step:

  1. Set up the device attribute structure (via the DEVICE_ATTR_RW macro; see the preceding section for more information) and create our first sysfs (pseudo) file:
// ch2/sysfs_simple_intf/sysfs_simple_intf.c

#define SYSFS_FILE1 llkdsysfs_debug_level
// [... <we show the actual read/write callback functions just a bit further down> ...]
static DEVICE_ATTR_RW(SYSFS_FILE1);

int __init sysfs_simple_intf_init(void)
{
[...]
/* << 0. The platform device is created via the platform_device_register_simple() API; code already shown above ... >> */

// 1. Create our first sysfile file : llkdsysfs_debug_level
/* The device_create_file() API creates a sysfs attribute file for
* given device (1st parameter); the second parameter is the pointer
* to it's struct device_attribute structure dev_attr_<name...