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

Additional Information: Miscellaneous Kernel Internals

Here's some general information on dynamic memory allocation and I/O memory access methods.

While talking about dynamic memory allocation, we should keep in mind that we're programming in the C language inside the kernel, so it's really important to remember that each allocated memory chunk must be freed up when not used anymore. This is very important because in userspace, when a process ends its execution, the kernel (which actually knows all about memory chunks owned by the process) can easily get back all process-allocated memory; but this does not hold true for the kernel. In fact, a driver (or other kernel entity) that asks for a memory chunk must be sure to free it, otherwise, nobody will ask for it back and the memory chunk will be lost until the machine is restarted.

Regarding access to I/O memory,...