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

Working with kernel modules

Knowing how to add custom code to the kernel is useful but, when we have to write a new driver, it can be more useful writing our code as a kernel module. In fact, by using a module, we can easily modify kernel code and then test it without rebooting the system every time! We simply have to remove and then reinsert the module (after the necessary modifications) in order to test the new version of our code.

In this recipe, we'll take a look at how kernel modules can get compiled even on a directory outside the kernel tree.

Getting ready

To turn our dummy-code.c file into a kernel module, we only have to change our kernel settings, allowing the compilation of our example module (by replacing...