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

Handling resources

The main purpose of a driver is to handle and manage devices, and most of the time expose their functionalities to the user space. The objective here is to gather the device's configuration parameters, and especially resources (memory region, interrupt line, DMA channel, clocks, and so on).

The following is the device node with which we will work during this section. It is the i.MX6 UART device's node, defined in arch/arm/boot/dts/imx6qdl.dtsi:

uart1: serial@02020000 { 
        compatible = "fsl,imx6q-uart", "fsl,imx21-uart"; 
reg = <0x02020000 0x4000>; 
        interrupts = <0 26 IRQ_TYPE_LEVEL_HIGH>; 
        clocks = <&clks IMX6QDL_CLK_UART_IPG>, 
<&clks IMX6QDL_CLK_UART_SERIAL>; 
        clock-names = "ipg", "per"; 
dmas = <&sdma 25 4 0>, <&sdma 26 4 0>...