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

Chapter 3: Dealing with Kernel Core Helpers

The Linux kernel is a standalone piece of software—as you'll see in this chapter—that does not depend on any external library as it implements any functionalities it needs to use (from list management to compression algorithms, everything is implemented from scratch). It implements any mechanism you may encounter in modern libraries and even more, such as compression, string functions, and so on. We will walk step by step through the most important aspects of such capabilities.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Linux kernel locking mechanisms and shared resources
  • Dealing with kernel waiting, sleeping, and delay mechanisms
  • Understanding Linux kernel time management
  • Implementing work-deferring mechanisms
  • Kernel interrupt handling