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Linux Device Drivers Development

Linux Device Drivers Development

By : John Madieu
4 (30)
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Linux Device Drivers Development

Linux Device Drivers Development

4 (30)
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)
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1
Introduction to Kernel Development

Linked lists

Imagine you have a driver that manages more than one device, let's say five devices. You may need to keep a track of each of them in your driver. What you need here is a linked list. Two types of linked list actually exist:

  • Simply linked list
  • Doubly linked list

Therefore, kernel developers only implement circular doubly linked lists because this structure allows you to implement FIFO and LIFO, and kernel developers take care to maintain a minimal set of code. The header to be added in the code in order to support lists is <linux/list.h>. The data structure at the core of list implementation in the kernel is the struct list_head structure, defined as the following:

struct list_head { 
    struct list_head *next, *prev; 
 }; 

The struct list_head is used in both the head of the list and each node. In the world of the kernel, before a data structure...

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