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 a device tree to describe a character driver

We have seen that by using a device tree, we can specify different driver settings and then modify the driver's functionalities. However, our possibilities do not finish here! In fact, we can use the same code for different driver's releases or a different types of the same device.

How to manage different device types

Let's suppose our chrdev has two other implementations (plus the current one) in which the hardware is done in such a way that most parameters are fixed (and well known) and not selectable by the developer; in this case, we can still use node properties to specify them, but doing this is error prone and it forces the user to know these constraints...