Book Image

Linux Device Driver Development Cookbook

By : Rodolfo Giometti
Book Image

Linux Device Driver Development Cookbook

By: Rodolfo Giometti

Overview of this book

Linux is a unified kernel that is widely used to develop embedded systems. As Linux has turned out to be one of the most popular operating systems worldwide, the interest in developing proprietary device drivers has also increased. Device drivers play a critical role in how the system performs and ensure that the device works in the manner intended. By exploring several examples on the development of character devices, the technique of managing a device tree, and how to use other kernel internals, such as interrupts, kernel timers, and wait queue, you’ll be able to add proper management for custom peripherals to your embedded system. You’ll begin by installing the Linux kernel and then configuring it. Once you have installed the system, you will learn to use different kernel features and character drivers. You will also cover interrupts in-depth and understand how you can manage them. Later, you will explore the kernel internals required for developing applications. As you approach the concluding chapters, you will learn to implement advanced character drivers and also discover how to write important Linux device drivers. By the end of this book, you will be equipped with the skills you need to write a custom character driver and kernel code according to your requirements.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
10
Additional Information: Managing Interrupts and Concurrency

Technical requirements

When we have to manage a peripheral, it's quite common to need to modify its internal configuration settings, or it may be useful to map it from the user space as if it was a memory buffer in which we can modify internal data just by referencing a pointer.

For example, frame buffers or frame grabbers are good candidates to be mapped as a big chunk of memory from the user space point of view.

In this case, having the support of the lseek(), ioctl(), and mmap() system calls is fundamental. If, from the user space, the usage of these system calls is not tricky, within the kernel they require some attention by the driver developer, especially the mmap() system call, which involves the kernel Memory Management Unit (MMU).

Not only that one of the principal tasks a driver developer must pay attention to is the data exchanging mechanism with the user space...