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

Driver data structures

When you deal with NIC devices, there are two data structures that you need to play with:

  • The struct sk_buff structure, defined in include/linux/skbuff.h, which is the fundamental data structure in the Linux networking code, and which should be included in your code:
#include <linux/skbuff.h>  
  • Each packet sent or received is handled using this data structure.
  • The struct net_device structure; this is the structure by which any NIC device is represented in the kernel. It is the interface by which data transit takes place. It is defined in include/linux/netdevice.h, which should also be included in your code:
#include <linux/netdevice.h> 

Other files that one should include in the code are include/linux/etherdevice.h for MAC and Ethernet-related functions (such as alloc_etherdev()) and include/linux/ethtool.h for ethtools support:

#include...