Book Image

Linux Device Drivers Development

By : John Madieu
Book Image

Linux Device Drivers Development

By: John Madieu

Overview of this book

Linux kernel is a complex, portable, modular and widely used piece of software, running on around 80% of servers and embedded systems in more than half of devices throughout the World. Device drivers play a critical role in how well a Linux system performs. As Linux has turned out to be one of the most popular operating systems used, the interest in developing proprietary device drivers is also increasing steadily. This book will initially help you understand the basics of drivers as well as prepare for the long journey through the Linux Kernel. This book then covers drivers development based on various Linux subsystems such as memory management, PWM, RTC, IIO, IRQ management, and so on. The book also offers a practical approach on direct memory access and network device drivers. By the end of this book, you will be comfortable with the concept of device driver development and will be in a position to write any device driver from scratch using the latest kernel version (v4.13 at the time of writing this book).
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Introduction to Kernel Development

Putting it all together

So far, we have described structures used when writing drivers for input devices, and how they can be managed from the user space:

  1. Allocate a new input device, according to its type, polled or not, using input_allocate_polled_device() or input_allocate_device().
  2. Fill in the mandatory fields (if necessary):
    • Specify the type of event the device supports by using the set_bit() helper macro on the input_dev.evbit field
    • Depending on the event type, EV_REL, EV_ABS, EV_KEY, or other, indicate code this device can report using either input_dev.relbit, input_dev.absbit, input_dev.keybit, or other
    • Specify input_dev.dev in order to set up a proper device tree
    • Fill abs_info if necessary
    • For polled devices, indicate at which interval the poll() function should be called:
  1. Write your open() function if necessary, in which you should prepare and set up the...