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

Framebuffer from user space

You usually access framebuffer memory by means of the mmap() command in order to map the framebuffer memory to the part of the system RAM, so that drawing pixels on the screen becomes a simple matter of affecting memory value. Screen parameters (variable and fixed) are extracted by means of ioctl commands, especially FBIOGET_VSCREENINFO and FBIOGET_FSCREENINFO. The complete list is available at include/uapi/linux/fb.h in the kernel source.

The following is a sample code to draw a 300*300 square on the framebuffer:

#include <stdlib.h> 
#include <unistd.h> 
#include <stdio.h> 
#include <fcntl.h> 
#include <linux/fb.h> 
#include <sys/mman.h> 
#include <sys/ioctl.h> 
 
#define FBCTL(_fd, _cmd, _arg)         \ 
    if(ioctl(_fd, _cmd, _arg) == -1) { \ 
        ERROR("ioctl failed");         \ 
   ...