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

Dealing with the SPI driver abstraction and architecture

This is where the driver logic takes place. It consists of filling struct spi_driver with a set of driving functions that allow probing and controlling the underlying device.

Probing the device

The SPI device is probed by the spi_driver.probe callback. The probe callback is responsible for making sure the driver recognizes the given device before they can be bound together. This callback has the following prototype:

int probe(struct spi_device *spi)

This method must return 0 on success, or a negative error number otherwise. The only argument is the SPI device to be probed, whose structure has been pre-initialized by the core according to its description in the device tree.

However, most (if not all) of the properties of the SPI device can be overridden, as we have seen while describing its data structure. SPI protocol drivers may need to update the transfer mode if the device doesn't work with its default...