Linux Device Drivers, 3rd Edition
Device drivers literally drive every thing you’re interested in–disks, monitors, keyboards, modems–every little thing outside the personal computer chip and memory. And writing device drivers is 1 of the couple of areas of programming for the Linux operating technique that calls for unique, Linux-distinct understanding. For years now, programmers have relied on the classic Linux Device Drivers from O’Reilly to master this crucial topic. Now in its third edition, this bestselling guide gives all the info you will want to write drivers for a wide range of devices.
Over the years the book has helped countless programmers find out:
- how to support computer peripherals under the Linux operating technique
- how to create and write software program for new hardware under Linux
- the basics of Linux operation even if they are not expecting to write a driver
The new edition of Linux Device Drivers is greater than ever. The book covers all the substantial changes to Version two.6 of the Linux kernel, which simplifies many activities, and contains subtle new functions that can make a driver both a lot more efficient and far more flexible. Readers will find new chapters on important sorts of drivers not covered previously, such as consoles, USB drivers, and a lot more.
Greatest of all, you don’t have to be a kernel hacker to realize and get pleasure from this book. All you require is an understanding of the C programming language and some background in Unix technique calls. And for maximum ease-of-use, the book utilizes full-featured examples that you can compile and run without special hardware.
Right now Linux holds quickly as the most rapidly growing segment of the computer market and continues to win over enthusiastic adherents in a lot of application places. With this increasing support, Linux is now absolutely mainstream, and viewed as a solid platform for embedded systems. If you are writing device drivers, you’ll want this book. In fact, you will wonder how drivers are ever written without having it.
Updated to cover version 2.four.x of the Linux kernel, the second edition of Linux Device Drivers remains the finest common-purpose, paper-bound guide for programmers wishing to make hardware devices function under the world’s most well-liked open-source operating technique. The authors take care to show how to write drivers that are portable–that is, that compile and run under all common Linux platforms. That, along with the reality that they’re cautious to clarify and illustrate concepts, makes this book extremely nicely suited to any programmer familiar with C but not with the hardware-software program 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 in no way written a driver for any platform before. It assists if you have some Linux or Unix background, but even that is secondary as a prerequisite to C skill.
For a programming text–and 1 concerned with low-level instructions and data structures, at that–this book is remarkably wealthy in prose. You will generally want to read this book straight through, a lot more or less skipping the code samples, just before sketching out your program for the driver you need to have to write. Then, go back and pay closer attention to the sections on certain details you require to implement, like custom task queues. For coding-time particulars about specific program calls and programming tactics, count on the index to point you to the appropriate passages. –David Wall
Topics covered: Techniques for writing hardware device drivers that run under Linux kernels two..x by means of 2.2.x. Sections show how to manage memory, time, interrupts, ports, and other details of the hardware-software program interface.
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great book for the right person,
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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|Needs work.,
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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|Linux Device Drivers,
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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