Linux Device Drivers (Nutshell Handbooks)

Honestly, I really don't understand how anyone can give this book 5 stars. To start off on a positive tone, I'll say what I liked about it. 1) Lots of information. There is no denying this, it is very informitive. However, this is a double edged swords (will discuss later) 2) The basic drivers are described pretty well. The scull driver is a good way to ease into driver development, imo. Simple enough that it's not too overwhelming and ununderstandable, but not overly simple so that you actually get an idea of what's going on. 3) It's free. That's it for the positives. Now for a huge list of negatives. 1) Most of the information is irrelevent. I feel like the authors lost focus as the book went on, and forgot they were not writing a general "Linux Kernel" book but a specific book for drivers. Many a time do they spend pages upon pages going on about something, only to mention "but this is never used by read driver developers" at the end. You end up in a really unpleasant situation where you have to sift through a bunch of useless info to get to the useful stuff. Most of the time I ended up just searching google, and got better results. 2) Lack of more complex examples. Let's face it, no one needs to write an extremely simple char driver. However, that's as complex as the examples get. Beyond the scull driver, it's just code fragments. I sincerely hope you don't have to write a serial tty device. Which leads me to my next point. 3) Outdated. Many kernel API changes have been made to the point where the code is no longer compilable (especially on the tty front). Methods used in the book have been done away with in the newer kernel API's. Honestly, you're much better off just resorting to Google. If you want to write your own driver and you read through this book, you'll still have no idea where to start. The functions in the scull driver are well-described, but that's it. The authors use too much space writing about useless crap you really don't care about, and this comes at the expense of useful info that will actually help you write drivers. This book will probably come up on your google searches, and it might be worth it to skim the regular chapters. Honestly though, it's not going to tell you anything your other search results won't. This is most definitely not the "end all, be all" of writing linux drivers, it just happens to be the only one.

This book is for anyone who wants to support computer peripherals under the Linux operating system or who wants to develop new hardware and run it under Linux. Linux is the fastest-growing segment of the UNIX market and is winning over enthusiastic adherents in many application areas. This book reveals information that heretofore has been passed by word-of-mouth or in cryptic source code comments, showing how to write a driver for a wide range of devices.

You don't have to be a kernel hacker to understand and enjoy this book; all you need is an understanding of C and some background in UNIX system calls. Drivers for character devices, block devices, and network interfaces are all described in step-by-step form and are illustrated with full-featured examples that show driver design issues, which can be executed without special hardware.

For those who are curious about how an operating system does its job, this book provides insights into address spaces, asynchronous events, and I/O.

Portability is a major concern in the text. The book is centered on version 2.0, but also covers 1.2.13 and experimental versions up to 2.1.43. You are also told how to maximize portability among hardware platforms.

Contents include:

• Building a driver and loading modules
• Complete character, block, and network drivers
• Debugging a driver
• Timing
• Memory management and DMA
• Interrupts
• Portability issues
• Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI)
• A tour of kernel internals

"We're back to the times when men were men and wrote their own device drivers." -- Linus Torvalds. Of course, this is also a very good publication for the excellent, equally facile (and less macho) kernel and hardware programmers of the opposite gender. Comments aside, this is a very good (and to-date the only publication) for programmers and developers that covers device drivers in-depth. The author assumes that you understand the Linux kernel and C code.

This is, on the surface, a book about writing device drivers for the Linux system. That is a worthy goal, of course; the flow of new hardware products is not likely to slow down anytime soon, and somebody is going to have to make all those new gadgets work with Linux. But this book is also about how the Linux kernel works and how to adapt its workings to your needs or interests. Linux is an open system; with this book, we hope, it will be more open and accessible to a larger community of developers.Much has changed with Linux since the first edition of this book came out. Linux now runs on many more processors and supports a much wider variety of hardware. Many of the internal programming interfaces have changed significantly. Thus, the second edition. This book covers the 2.4 kernel, with all of the new features that it provides, while still giving a look backward to earlier releases for those who need to support them. We hope you’ll enjoy reading this book as much as we have enjoyed writing it.