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

Handling module parameters

Similar to a user program, a kernel module can accept arguments from the command line. This allows us to dynamically change the behavior of the module according to the given parameters, which can help a developer not have to indefinitely change/compile the module during a test/debug session. In order to set this up, we should first declare the variables that will hold the values of command-line arguments and use the module_param() macro on each of these. The macro is defined in include/linux/moduleparam.h (this should be included in the code too – #include <linux/moduleparam.h>) as follows:

module_param(name, type, perm);

This macro contains the following elements:

  • name: The name of the variable used as the parameter.
  • type: The parameter's type (bool, charp, byte, short, ushort, int, uint, long, and ulong), where charp stands for character pointer.
  • perm: This represents the /sys/module/<module>/parameters/&lt...