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 methods

Driver methods are the probe() and remove() functions. They are responsible for (un)registering the network device with the kernel. The driver has to provide its functionalities to the kernel through the device methods by means of the struct net_device structure. These are the operations that can be performed on the network interface:

static const struct net_device_ops my_netdev_ops = { 
   .ndo_open         = my_netdev_open, 
   .ndo_stop         = my_netdev_close, 
   .ndo_start_xmit   = my_netdev_start_xmit, 
   .ndo_set_rx_mode  = my_netdev_set_multicast_list, 
   .ndo_set_mac_address    = my_netdev_set_mac_address, 
   .ndo_tx_timeout   = my_netdev_tx_timeout, 
   .ndo_change_mtu   = eth_change_mtu, 
   .ndo_validate_addr      = eth_validate_addr, 
}; 

The preceding operations are the operations that most drivers implement.

...