PrefaceEssential Linux Device Drivers
by Sreekrishnan Venkiteswaran
Preface
It was the late nineties and at IBM, we were putting the Linux kernel on a wrist watch. The target device was tiny, but the task was turning out to be tough. The Memory Technology Devices subsystem didn't exist in the kernel, which meant that before a filesystem could start life on the watch's flash memory, we had to develop the necessary storage driver from scratch. Interfacing the watch's touch screen with user applications was complicated since the kernel's input event driver interface hadn't been conceived yet. Getting X-Windows to run on the watch's LCD wasn't easy since it didn't work well with framebuffer drivers. Of what use is a water-proof Linux wrist watch if you can't stream stock quotes from your bath tub? Bluetooth integration with Linux was several years away, and months were spent porting a proprietary Bluetooth stack to Internet-enable the watch. Power management support was good enough only to squeeze a few hours of juice from the watch's battery, hence we had work cut out on that front too. Linux-Infrared was still unstable, so we had to coax the stack before we could use an Infrared keyboard for data entry. And we had to compile the compiler and cross-compile a compact application-set since there were no accepted distributions in the consumer electronics space.
Fast forward to the present: The baby penguin has grown into a healthy teenager. What took thousands of lines of code and a year in development back then, can be accomplished in a few days with the current kernels. But to become a versatile kernel engineer who can magically weave solutions, you need to understand the myriad features and facilities that Linux offers today.
About the Book
Among the various subsystems residing in the kernel source tree, the drivers/directory constitutes the single largest chunk and is several times bigger than the others. With new and diverse technologies arriving in popular form factors, the development of new device drivers in the kernel is accelerating steadily. The latest kernels support over 50 device driver families.
This book is about writing Linux device drivers. It covers the design and development of major device classes supported by the kernel, including those I missed during my Linux-on-Watch days. The discussion of each driver family starts by looking at the corresponding technology, moves on to develop a practical example, and ends by looking at relevant kernel source files. But before foraying into the world of device drivers, the book introduces you to the kernel and discusses the important features of 2.6 Linux, emphasizing those portions that are of special interest to device driver writers.
Audience
This book is intended for the intermediate-level programmer eager to tweak the kernel to enable new devices. You should have a working knowledge of operating system concepts. For example, you should know what a system call is, and why concurrency issues have to be factored in while writing kernel code. The book assumes that you have downloaded Linux on your system, poked through the kernel sources, and at least skimmed through some related documentation. And you should be pretty good in C.
Summary of Chapters
The first three chapters prepare you to digest the rest of the book. Each of the next fifteen chapters discusses drivers for a specific device family. The following chapter is a hold-all for driver classes not covered thus far. The penultimate chapter discusses device driver debugging. The last chapter gives some perspective on delivery and maintenance.
Chapter 1, "Introduction," starts our tryst with Linux. It hurries you through downloading the kernel sources, making trivial code changes, and building a bootable kernel image.
Chapter 2, "A Peek Inside the Kernel," takes a brisk peek into the innards of the Linux kernel and teaches you some must-know kernel concepts. It first takes you through the boot process and then describes kernel services particularly relevant to driver development such as kernel threads, timers, concurrency, and memory management.
Chapter 3, "Getting Started with Device Drivers," gets you started with the art of writing Linux device drivers. It looks at interrupt handling, the new Linux device model, and Linux assembly. In this chapter, you'll also learn to use kernel helper interfaces such as linked lists, work queues, completion functions, and notifier chains. These helper facilities simplify your code, weed out redundancies from the kernel, and help long-term maintenance.
Chapter 4, "Character Drivers," looks at the architecture of character device drivers. Several concepts introduced in this chapter such as polling, asynchronous notification, and I/O control, are relevant to subsequent chapters as well, since many device classes discussed in the rest of the book are 'super' character devices.
Chapter 5, "Serial Drivers," explains the kernel layer that handles serial devices. The serial layer consists of low-level drivers, the TTY layer, and line disciplines.
Chapter 6, "Input Drivers," discusses the kernel's input subsystem that is responsible for servicing devices such as keyboards, mice, and touch panels.
Chapter 7, "The Inter-Integrated Circuit Protocol," dissects drivers for devices such as EEPROMs that are connected to the system I2C bus or SMBus. The chapter also looks at other serial technologies such as the SPI bus and one-wire bus.
Chapter 8,"PCMCIA and Compact Flash," delves into the PCMCIA subsystem. It teaches you to write drivers for devices having a PCMCIA or Compact Flash form factor.
Chapter 9, "Peripheral Component Interconnect," looks at kernel support for PCI and its derivatives such as CardBus and PCI Express.
Chapter 10, "Universal Serial Bus," explores USB architecture and device drivers.
Chapter 11, "Video Drivers," explains the Linux video family.
Chapter 12, "Audio Drivers," describes the Linux audio family.
Chapter 13, "Block Drivers," covers drivers for devices such as IDE and SCSI. It also looks at filesystem drivers.
Chapter 14, "Network Interface Cards," is dedicated to network devices. You'll learn about kernel networking data structures and how to interface network drivers with protocol layers.
Chapter 15, "Linux Without Wires," looks at driving different wireless technologies such as Bluetooth, Infrared, WiFi and cellular communication.
Chapter 16, "Memory Technology Devices," discusses flash memory enablement. This chapter first looks at flash-based protocols and chipsets primarily used on embedded devices. It ends by examining drivers for the Firmware Hub found on desktops and laptops.
Chapter 17, "Embedding Linux," steps into the world of embedded Linux. It takes you through the main firmware components of an embedded solution, such as bootloader, kernel, and device drivers. Given the soaring popularity of Linux in the embedded space, it's likely that you'll use the device driver skills that you acquire from this book, to enable embedded devices.
Chapter 18, "User Mode Drivers," looks at driving different types of devices from user space. Some device drivers, especially ones that are heavy on policy and light on performance requirements, are better off residing in user land. This chapter also explains how the new ultra-scalable process scheduler improves response times of user mode drivers.
Chapter 19, "More Devices and Drivers," takes a tour of a potpourri of driver families not covered thus far, such as Error Detection And Correction (EDAC), cpufreq, FireWire and ACPI.
Chapter 20, "Debugging Device Drivers,&...
