Customer Reviews

Linux Device Drivers, 3rd Edition

5 star:		(33)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I used this book to write a device driver for my computer engineering senior project. It was very helpfull, but could improve. 2nd edition covers almost everything you'll need for 2.4 kernel drivers. Organization is like a text book that includes reference material, but attempts to be a tutorial. Hopefully the 3rd edition will be better organized. I noticed lots of negative reviews on Amazon, but after reading some chapters on safari (the oreilly free book site) I decided to purchase it any ways. If you buy this book and don't have a solid background in operating systems, computer architecture, and microprocessor interfacing you probably won't have an easy time understanding several key topics well enough to write a working driver. This will probably make you mad enough to write another bad review.

Does contain lots of interesting info about Linux drivers and Linux in general. But the meat is more reference than tutorial. A really great tutorial begins chapter two, and so I thought here I'm really going to learn everything I need to know about creating Linux drivers. Didn't turn out that way. After you work the first exercise, that is, the tutorial example at the beginning of chapter two, you have seen the last of the complete examples. From here on it's code fragments and isolated functions. The author obviously could have written the book we need. But he didn't. It's a valuable book, but it's not a tutorial. What a beginner needs are whole, complete, real, listings of programs that work. Which reminds me, a real driver that drives a real device, presented in its entirety, with all details of how to compile it, and how to run it, would have been far more instructive than a "driver" that reads and writes only in memory so that it can be "portable" across many Linux platforms. A portable driver probably is a neat stunt that impresses existing gurus, but that's not the group that needs this book. To see what I'm driving at, look at Kernighan and Pike's "The UNIX Programming Environment." Their big programming project is indeed presented in fragments and isolated functions in their chapter eight, but the entire project just as it will appear on your disk is listed in the appendix. If Rubini had followed that model his book could have been really instructive. But he didn't. So there's an opportunity here. Some guru should set down and assemble these fragments into the book we need.

This is a great book for understanding drivers and the Linux kernel internals, but only if you have a strong assembly/C background and know PC hardware. I found myself checking other books on programming often to understand the content of this book.

This is the best and most complete book on writing linux device drivers yet. My only suggestions are (1) that the author writes a new addition or supplement for the 2.2 kernel and (2) that this new book include an example driver after the hello world driver that is only slighlty more complicated in that it uses the fops and one method. An example of how user-space code would then call this driver would be helpful as well.

Bravo

Before starting let me assure you that I had written SCSI drivers for SVR4 and 4.2. I had also done some proprietary drivers for *BSDs earlier during undergrad/grad years.

After reading all the reviews and all the ravings about this book, I made the mistake of spending my money on it! Alas! What a waste. Its like one gigantic piece of mish-mash-mess. All the information might be in there (who knows). But, finding out the correct info is almost impossible! The scull driver is a joke.

Another irritating thing about the book is that it attempts to throw all sorts of info at you, all at the same time! Guys, take a break. Present information, one at a time, and only when needed.

Essentially, I was trying to write a driver to read information off my Nikon F100 onto my TP600 running Mandrake 8.0. And life was miserable till I finally started digging through some other driver code that you get with the kernel sources. Gosh, that made life so simple.

But, when I first read this book, I was almost ready to give up writing Linux drivers. I didn't know where to start and where I would end up! I was lost, confused, and felt utterly hopeless.

Also, I wondered if the other guys who had raved about this book were:
1. the authors and their friends?
2. guys who had no clue what they were talking/writing about?
3. guys who were happy to see that there was a book on Linux drivers, but neither bought nor read it!

So, don't trust these reviews. This is one heck of a horrible book that you should most definitely stay away from. Cause if you read, you would never be able to write any useful drivers.

Read the source.

It's just a gift of heaven (and O'Reilly) for any Linux device driver writer. You can find everything you need to know about device driver basics there, in a 'user-friendly' form. Sample code is also included. You'll find there explanation of all file operations, structures and useful functions used by device drivers (character, block and network). In addition, there are hints concerning some tricky things (such as ISA autoprobing), and they are sharpened for Linux!

What this book really lacks, is

1) Explanation of Linux rules for writing one's own standard (such as Video for Linux), or at least advice for how to do it. There are way too few pure character devices for the question of standartization to be ignored, IMHO!

2) New 2.2.* kernel features. If you are seeking for detailed and exact explanation of the functions of _THESE_ kernels, this is not your book. So, Alessandro, we are all waiting for a second edition!

This book is a must-have if you want to write your own device drivers for Linux, or if you just need a place to get started hacking the kernel.

All the basics are covered and you really don't need to know much about the kernel internals to read this book. If you're not a beginner it still contains valuable information and it's organized in a way to make it very easy to skip the areas you are already familiar with.

After a few chapters you'll be able to write your own driver from scratch. When you have read the whole book you'll also be familiar with some of the more complex concepts of kernel programming. You will not be an expert kernel hacker but you will have an excellent base for learning more yourself.

The only drawback is that it doesn't completely cover the newer kernels (2.2 and above), but although some details have changed, most of the concepts are still more or less the same, so the knowledge you gain can easily be adapted to the later versions.

This book takes a hypothetical device driver and explains the concepts nicely. It provides various fundamentals one needs to know before writing linux device drivers, and valuable information like concurrent and race conditions, and gives ideas for debugging problems in real drivers. It is worth read and I liked it. I had already some experience in kernel programming before reading this book, and it filled holes in my kernel knowledge. This book is also available online[...] and you may check yourself before buying this.

The objections made by other reviewers fall into the following two classes. Once you are a experienced hacker, all you need is kernel sources (books are for fundamentals only and become obsolete as new kernel constructs are added). If you are looking for cut and paste template code to add new driver for another device, again use kernel source of an existing driver.

This book is not for Linux (kernel) newbies but for those who already know their way around the kernel and seek detailed info on certain parts of it. This book has some good overviews on different subsystems of the Linux kernel. Some sections, like USB, have been expanded since the second edition of this book. I would have liked to see a section on the new 2.6 scheduler.

If you want to start off with Linux kernel programming, I would recommend Linux Kernel Development by Robert Love. These books, together with articles on the web, should certainly help anyone interested.

This is a good book - and I joined the Linux kernel immortals by writing a driver for a previously unsupported device based on it. But it does have a few flaws.
Firstly, it is pretty much Intel (ix86) specific - other processors are mentioned in passing.
Secondly it doesn't deal with the real world of Linux devices (ie where the manufacturer has told you little or nothing).
And thirdly, it never quite goes far enough in exploring the difficult issues - I thought this was the case with IRQ handling especially.
But, all in all, the best on offer and well worth buying.