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

Locking (and syncing) with the interrupt context

Now, let's see how we can avoid race conditions between the process context and the interrupt context. However, this time we must pay more attention than before because, this time, we must implement a locking mechanism to protect shared data between the process context and the interrupt context. However, we must also provide a syncing mechanism between the reading process and the driver too, to allow the reading process to proceed in its action if some data to be read is present within the driver's queues.

To explain this problem, it is better to do a practical example. Let's suppose we have a peripheral that generates data for reading processes. To signal that new data has arrived, the peripheral sends an interrupt to the CPU, so we can imagine implementing our driver by using a circular buffer where the interrupt...