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

Chapter 1: Introduction to Kernel Development

Linux started as a hobby project in 1991 by a Finnish student, Linus Torvalds. The project has gradually grown and continues to do so, with roughly a thousand contributors around the world. Nowadays, Linux is a must, in embedded systems as well as on servers. A kernel is a central part of an operating system, and its development is not straightforward. Linux offers many advantages over other operating systems; it is free of charge, well documented with a large community, is portable across different platforms, provides access to the source code, and has a lot of free open source software.

This book will try to be as generic as possible. There is a special topic, known as the device tree, that is not a full x86 feature yet. This topic will be dedicated to ARM processors, especially those that fully support the device tree. Why those architectures? Because they are mostly used on desktops and servers (for x86), as well as embedded systems (ARM).

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Setting up the development environment
  • Understanding the kernel configuration process
  • Building your kernel