LINUX Device Drivers (Third Edition)

Author: JONATHANCORBET
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-01-01
Features: This book is the third edition of the classic work "Linux Device Drivers." If you want to support computer peripherals on the Linux operating system, run new hardware on Linux, or simply gain a general understanding of Linux kernel programming, you must read this book. This book describes how to write drivers for various devices, which in the past was only shared through word-of-mouth or scattered in mysterious code comments. The authors of this book are all leaders in the Linux community. Jonathan Corbet, though not a full-time kernel code contributor, is the executive editor of the highly regarded LWN.net news and information website. Alessandro Rubini is a Linux code contributor and the soul of the active Italian Linux community. Greg Kroah-Hartman is the maintainer of USB, PCI, and the driver core subsystem in the kernel (all covered in this book). This edition of the book has been thoroughly updated for the Linux kernel version 2.6.10. This kernel version has rationalized and simplified common tasks, such as plug-and-play, interaction with the sysfs filesystem in user space, and multi-device management on standard buses, among others. To read and understand this book, you don't need to become a kernel hacker first; just understanding the C language and having some background in Unix system calls is sufficient. You will learn how to write drivers for character devices, block devices, and network interfaces. For this purpose, the book provides complete example programs, which you can compile and run without special hardware. The book also covers the PCI, USB, and tty (terminal) subsystems in separate chapters. For readers who wish to understand the inner workings of an operating system, the book also delves into topics such as address spaces, asynchronous events, and I/O. The topics covered in this book include:
● Complete character, block, tty (terminal), and network drivers
● Driver debugging
● Interrupts
● Timing issues
● Concurrency, locking, and symmetric multiprocessing systems (SMP)
● Memory management and DMA
● Driver models and sysfs
● Hot-plug devices
● Descriptions of common buses, including SCSI, PCI, USB, and IEEE1394 (FireWire).