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

Using kernel data types

Often, data items of a particular size are required by the kernel code to match predefined binary structures, to hold peripheral's register data, to communicate with userspace or to simply to align data within structures by inserting padding fields.

Sometimes, kernel code requires data items of a specific size, perhaps to match predefined binary structures, to communicate with userspace, to hold peripheral's register data, or simply to align data within structures by inserting padding fields.

In this section, we're going to see some special data types that can be used by kernel developers to simplify their everyday job. In the following, we're going to see an example with fixed-size data types, which are very useful to define some kind of data that is intended to match exactly the structure of data expected by a device or by a communication...