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Linux Device Drivers (Nutshell Handbook) (Paperback)

by Alessandro Rubini (Author)

4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (47 customer reviews)

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Linux Device Drivers, 2nd Edition 4.2 out of 5 stars (47)
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	68% buy the item featured on this page: Linux Device Drivers (Nutshell Handbook) 4.2 out of 5 stars (47)
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	11% buy Understanding the Linux Kernel, Third Edition 4.5 out of 5 stars (23) $32.97
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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Updated to cover version 2.4.x of the Linux kernel, the second edition of Linux Device Drivers remains the best general-purpose, paper-bound guide for programmers wishing to make hardware devices work under the world's most popular open-source operating system. The authors take care to show how to write drivers that are portable--that is, that compile and run under all popular Linux platforms. That, along with the fact that they're careful to explain and illustrate concepts, makes this book very well suited to any programmer familiar with C but not with the hardware-software interface. It's worth noting that the emphasis in the title is on "device drivers" as much as "Linux." This book will make sense to you if you've never written a driver for any platform before. It helps if you have some Linux or Unix background, but even that is secondary as a prerequisite to C skill.

For a programming text--and one concerned with low-level instructions and data structures, at that--this book is remarkably rich in prose. You'll typically want to read this book straight through, more or less skipping the code samples, before sketching out your plan for the driver you need to write. Then, go back and pay closer attention to the sections on specific details you need to implement, like custom task queues. For coding-time details about specific system calls and programming techniques, count on the index to point you to the right passages. --David Wall

Topics covered: Techniques for writing hardware device drivers that run under Linux kernels 2.0.x through 2.2.x. Sections show how to manage memory, time, interrupts, ports, and other details of the hardware-software interface. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review
'Quite simply, It's an inspiration for anyone interested in pushing contemporary computer hardware and GNU/Linux to the limit'. Linux User, October 2001 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

Paperback: 439 pages
Publisher: O'Reilly; 1 edition (February 24, 1998)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1565922921
ISBN-13: 978-1565922921
Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.8 x 0.9 inches
Shipping Weight: 3.6 pounds

Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (47 customer reviews)

Amazon.com Sales Rank: #894,547 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)
Popular in this category: (What's this?)
#19 in Books > Computers & Internet > Programming > APIs & Operating Environments > Device Drivers

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Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover

Citations (learn more)

15 books cite this book:

Linux for Embedded and Real-Time Applications (Embedded Technology) by Doug Abbott on page 85, and page 104
UNIX Systems Programming: Communication, Concurrency and Threads by Kay A. Robbins on page 89, and Back Matter
Embedded Software and Systems: First International Conference, ICESS 2004, Hangzhou, China, December 9-10, 2004, Revised Selected Papers (Lecture Notes ... Computer Science and General Issues) by Zhaohui Wu on page 422, and page 429
SCI: Scalable Coherent Interface: Architecture and Software for High-Performance Compute Clusters (Lecture Notes in Computer Science) by Hermann Hellwagner on page 190, and page 237
Real-Time Systems Development by Rob Williams on page 433

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Customer Reviews

47 Reviews

5 star:		(29)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(4)

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4.2 out of 5 stars (47 customer reviews)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Linux Device Drivers, December 15, 1999

By	Daniel Sheltraw (USA New Mexico) - See all my reviews

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

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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars great book for the right person, February 19, 2005

By	Charles Notley (Mountain View, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Linux Device Drivers, 2nd Edition (Paperback)

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.

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28 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Needs work., September 2, 1999

By	Jack Dennon (Warrenton, OR USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Invaluable
If you have to write a linux kernel module, this book is a lifesaver. The source-code for the samples is available online and saved me a ton of time getting the basics of a... Read more

Published 3 days ago by Dave Dopson

4.0 out of 5 stars A good balance of "How" and "Why"
I have read both this book and Sreekrishnan Venkateswaran's Essential Linux Device Drivers, both are excellent, I prefer this one on generic topics such as:

Chapter... Read more

Published 1 month ago by Yong Zhi

5.0 out of 5 stars Possibly still the best book on the subject
Even though the third edition is showing its age - it covers kernel version 2.6.10, which is terribly old - in my opinion this is still the best book on the subject... Read more

Published 6 months ago by T. Mikov

5.0 out of 5 stars Best book for device drivers programming
This book covers in a excelent way all the process for creating device drivers. Its very good for who wants to start to programming and for who already knows how to programming.

Published 9 months ago by Camila Corradi

5.0 out of 5 stars Device Drivers
This books must be the top priority for ever developer who wants to develop emebedded systems, based on Linux OS.

Published 11 months ago by Luis Vitorio Cargnini

5.0 out of 5 stars I Can do this.
As a newbie it makes driver writing not so scary.
Technical masterpiece yet not over my head.

Published 16 months ago by Chauvin M. Emmons

5.0 out of 5 stars Best Linux 2.4 Device Driver Book
Used this to write my first linux driver on my own with no help. Great book, great layout, very well written. Read more

Published on January 24, 2007 by Ceri Davies

5.0 out of 5 stars ITA - La programmazione di moduli del kernel spiegata dettagliatamente
Un must per chi si avvicina alla programmazione di moduli del kernel, per chi e' esperto ma ha bisogno di un reference e per chi ne vuole sapere di piu'. Read more

Published on January 22, 2007 by Ryuujin

5.0 out of 5 stars Good overview of linux device driver programming concepts
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... Read more

Published on December 6, 2006 by mlpkr

4.0 out of 5 stars Good reference on Linux subsystems, not a book for starters
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. Read more

Published on October 12, 2006 by Vijay Venkatraman

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