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

Introduction to the concept of completion

This section will briefly describe completion and the necessary part of its API that the DMA transfer uses. For a complete description, feel free to have a look at the kernel documentation at Documentation/scheduler/completion.txt. In kernel programming, a typical practice is to start some activity outside of the current thread and then wait for it to finish. Completions are good alternatives to waitqueues or sleeping APIs while waiting for a very commonly occurring process to complete. Completion variables are implemented using wait queues, with the only difference being that they make the developer's life easier as it does not require the wait queue to be maintained, which makes it very easy to see the intent of the code.

Working with completion requires this header:

#include <linux/completion.h> 

A completion variable is represented in the kernel as an instance of struct completion structures that can be initialized statically...