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Device Drivers
If you choose to write a device driver, you must take
everything written here as a guide, and no more. I cannot
guarantee that this chapter will be free of errors, and I
cannot guarantee that you will not damage your computer, even
if you follow these instructions exactly. It is highly
unlikely that you will damage it, but I cannot guarantee
against it. There is only one ``infallible'' direction I can
give you: Back up! Back up before you test your new
device driver, or you may regret it later.
- What is a Device Driver?
- What is this ``device driver'' stuff anyway? Here's
a very short introduction to the concept.
- User-space device drivers
- It's not always necessary to write a ``real'' device
driver. Sometimes you just need to know how to write
code that runs as a normal user process and still accesses
hardware.
- Device Driver Basics
- Assuming that you need to write a ``real'' device driver,
there are some things that you need to know regardless of
what type of driver you are writing. In fact, you may need
to learn what type of driver you ought to write...
- Character Device Drivers
- This section includes details specific to character device
drivers, and assumes that you know everything in the previous section.
- TTY drivers
- This section hasn't been written yet. TTY drivers are
character devices that interface with the kernel's generic TTY
support, and they require more than just a standard character
device interface. I'd appreciate it if someone would write
up how to attach a character device driver to the generic
TTY layer and submit it to me for inclusion in this guide.
- Block Device Drivers
- This section includes details specific to block device drivers (suprise!)
- Writing a SCSI Device Driver
- This is a technical paper written by Rik Faith at the
University of North Carolina.
- Network Device Drivers
- Alan Cox gives an introduction to the network layer, including
device drivers.
- Supporting Functions
- Many functions are useful to all sorts of drivers. Here is
a summary of quite a few of them.
- Translating Addresses in Kernel Space
- An edited version of a post of Linus Torvalds to the linux-kernel
mailing list about how to correctly deal with translating memory
references when writing kernel source code such as device drivers.
- Kernel-Level Exception Handling
- An edited version of a post of Joerg Pommnitz to the linux-kernel
mailing list about how the new (Linux 2.1.8) exception mechanism
works.
Other sources of information
Quite a few other references are also available on the topic
of writing Linux device drivers by now. I put up some (slightly
outdated by now, but still worth reading, I think) notes for a
talk I gave in May 1995 entitled
Writing
Linux Device Drivers,
which is specifically oriented at character devices implemented
as kernel runtime-loadable modules.
Linux Journal has
had a long-running series of articles called Kernel Korner
which, despite the wacky name, has had quite a bit of useful information
on it. Some of the articles from that column may be available on
the web; most of them are available for purchase as back issues.
One particularly useful series of articles, which focussed in
far more detail than my 30 minute talk on the subject of kernel
runtime-loadable modules, was in issues 23, 24, 25, 26, and 28.
They were written by Alessandro Rubini and Georg v. Zezschwitz.
Issue 29 is slated (as of this writing) to have an article
on writing network device drivers, written by Alan Cox.
Issues 9, 10, and 11 have a series that I wrote on block device
drivers.
Copyright (C) 1992, 1993, 1994, 1996 Michael K. Johnson,
johnsonm@redhat.com.
Responses
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- 1.
Re: Network Device Drivers (Paul Gortmaker)
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- 1.
Re: Network Device Drivers (Neal Tucker)
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- 1.
network driver info (Neal Tucker)
- 2.
Transmit function (Joerg Schorr)
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- 1.
Re: Transmit function (Paul Gortmaker)
- ...
- 2.
PCI Driver (Flavia Donno)
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- 1.
There is linux-2.0/drivers/pci/pci.c (Hasdi)
- 3.
Is waitv honored? (Michael K. Johnson)
- 4.
Device Driver notification of "Linux going down" (Stan Troeh)
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- 1.
Through application which has opened the device (Michael K. Johnson)
- 5.
Interrupt Sharing ? (Frieder Löffler)
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- 1.
Interrupt sharing-possible (Vladimir Myslik)
- ->
Interrupt sharing - How to do with Network Drivers? (Frieder Löffler)
- ->
Interrupt sharing 101 (Christophe Beauregard)
- 6.
help working with skb structures (arkane)
- 7.
Vertical Retrace Interrupt - I need to use it (Brynn Rogers)
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- 1.
Your choice... (Michael K. Johnson)
- 9.
Is Anybody know something about SIS 496 IDE chipset? (Alexander)
- 10.
Hardware Interface I/O Access (Terry Moore)
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- 1.
You are somewhat confused... (Michael K. Johnson)