Book Image

Linux Device Driver Development - Second Edition

By : John Madieu
Book Image

Linux Device Driver Development - Second Edition

By: John Madieu

Overview of this book

Linux is by far the most-used kernel on embedded systems. Thanks to its subsystems, the Linux kernel supports almost all of the application fields in the industrial world. This updated second edition of Linux Device Driver Development is a comprehensive introduction to the Linux kernel world and the different subsystems that it is made of, and will be useful for embedded developers from any discipline. You'll learn how to configure, tailor, and build the Linux kernel. Filled with real-world examples, the book covers each of the most-used subsystems in the embedded domains such as GPIO, direct memory access, interrupt management, and I2C/SPI device drivers. This book will show you how Linux abstracts each device from a hardware point of view and how a device is bound to its driver(s). You’ll also see how interrupts are propagated in the system as the book covers the interrupt processing mechanisms in-depth and describes every kernel structure and API involved. This new edition also addresses how not to write device drivers using user space libraries for GPIO clients, I2C, and SPI drivers. By the end of this Linux book, you’ll be able to write device drivers for most of the embedded devices out there.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
1
Section 1 -Linux Kernel Development Basics
6
Section 2 - Linux Kernel Platform Abstraction and Device Drivers
12
Section 3 - Making the Most out of Your Hardware
18
Section 4 - Misc Kernel Subsystems for the Embedded World

Section 3 - Making the Most out of Your Hardware

This section will deal with Linux kernel memory management, advanced concepts in kernel interrupt management, and direct memory access. Then, in order to simplify memory access operations, we will use the memory access abstraction implemented in the Linux kernel, the regmap. At the end of this section, we will introduce the Linux device model to have a better understanding and overview of the device hierarchy on the system.

The following chapters will be covered in this section:

  • Chapter 10, Understanding the Linux Kernel Memory Allocation
  • Chapter 11, Implementing Direct Memory Access (DMA) Support
  • Chapter 12, Abstracting Memory Access – Introduction to the Regmap API: a Register Map Abstraction
  • Chapter 13, Demystifying the Kernel IRQ Framework
  • Chapter 14, Introduction to the Linux Device Model