Essential Linux Device Drivers

Essential Linux Device Drivers Features

Additional Essential Linux Device Drivers Information

“Probably the most wide ranging and complete Linux device driver book I’ve read.”

--Alan Cox, Linux Guru and Key Kernel Developer

“Very comprehensive and detailed, covering almost every single Linux device driver type.”

--Theodore Ts’o, First Linux Kernel Developer in North America and Chief Platform Strategist of the Linux Foundation

The Most Practical Guide to Writing Linux Device Drivers

Linux now offers an exceptionally robust environment for driver development: with today’s kernels, what once required years of development time can be accomplished in days. In this practical, example-driven book, one of the world’s most experienced Linux driver developers systematically demonstrates how to develop reliable Linux drivers for virtually any device. Essential Linux Device Drivers is for any programmer with a working knowledge of operating systems and C, including programmers who have never written drivers before. Sreekrishnan Venkateswaran focuses on the essentials, bringing together all the concepts and techniques you need, while avoiding topics that only matter in highly specialized situations. Venkateswaran begins by reviewing the Linux 2.6 kernel capabilities that are most relevant to driver developers. He introduces simple device classes; then turns to serial buses such as I2C and SPI; external buses such as PCMCIA, PCI, and USB; video, audio, block, network, and wireless device drivers; user-space drivers; and drivers for embedded Linux–one of today’s fastest growing areas of Linux development. For each, Venkateswaran explains the technology, inspects relevant kernel source files, and walks through developing a complete example.

• Addresses drivers discussed in no other book, including drivers for I2C, video, sound, PCMCIA, and different types of flash memory

• Demystifies essential kernel services and facilities, including kernel threads and helper interfaces

• Teaches polling, asynchronous notification, and I/O control

• Introduces the Inter-Integrated Circuit Protocol for embedded Linux drivers

• Covers multimedia device drivers using the Linux-Video subsystem and Linux-Audio framework

• Shows how Linux implements support for wireless technologies such as Bluetooth, Infrared, WiFi, and cellular networking

• Describes the entire driver development lifecycle, through debugging and maintenance

• Includes reference appendixes covering Linux assembly, BIOS calls, and Seq files

What Customers Say About Essential Linux Device Drivers:

If you are real device driver developer, this book will not help at all. This book looks like just a collection of "copy and paste" from many device drivers source code, and explanation is very superficial (I felt that this book is just like his jot downs from his work plus some copy and paste from linux driver codes). I believe that if you are real software engineer from linux related field, you can not give more than 2 stars.

If you just want to take a look what kind of device drivers are there and how it roughly looks like, you may take a look at this book. it is merely for what devices are there) I purchased this book by just reading the reviews here, and got disappointed a lot. If you really want to understand how linux device drivers works, do not buy this book.

I can not believe how people gave more than 2 stars to this book. I would recommend linux device drivers 3rd edition from oreily even though it does not cover latest kernel. (But, do not expect more from those driver chapters.

it is not for you to understand how it work.

At least the o'reilly book touches on these topics. I tried to find docomentation about Module.symvers, linking at runtime, symbol issues, etc. No luck.

I keep "Essential Linux Device Drivers" on my desk, next to a bunch of other Linux kernel programming books: "Linux Device Drivers" by Rubini, "Linux Kernel Internals" by Beck et. I've looked carefully at the networking driver code, serial driver code, i2c driver code, and kernel thread/interlocking/timer primitives. (which is a bit outdated), "Embedded Linux" by Hollabaugh, "Building Embedded Linux Systems" by Yaghmour, "Understanding Linux Network Internals" by Benvenuti."Essential Linux Device Drivers" is the best one yet, followed by Rubini's as a closed second. But "Essential Linux Device Drivers" goes deeper, and has more real life code examples.

Venkateswaran. There are some suggestions I have (and this applies to all Linux books I've read). Second is to explain how the interrupt routine stack space is created at the bottom of the regular (thread) stack space. You've helped me a lot with my driver code. Overall, good job, Mr. al.

One is to make clear that the spin_lock_irqsave() API should be used instead of spin_lock() whenever it may be called from interrupt context. The $44.99 I paid was well spent on your book. Between these two books alone, you can learn how to write any device driver from scratch - if handed the hardware manual. The code in "Essential Linux Device Drivers" has obviously been copied from real development projects, and I found no errors in it.

To understand what the author is doing, you would have to resort to searching alternate references. I can tell that he never tried to compiled these examples.After reading the first few chapters, I decided to get the linux device drivers book from O'REILLY and as soon as I started reading, I could point out loads of important information that the first book failed to relay. The people who gave this book 5 starts are either friends of the author, the author himself, or guys who have been writing linux drivers for years and felt like reading what they already knew. Also his examples don't work. The examples in the O'REILLY book are also by far better. Although the author seems to be very knowledgeable on the topic, his book is really terrible at explaining the essential kernel functions needed for writing device drivers and their respective parameters. He only mentions that they exist.

That turns out not to be the case - no one could produce a driver with this book without the benefit of other reference material. This brings me to the second half of "Essential Linux Device Drivers", where specific device types are discussed.

You could be thinking that this book never claimed to enable you to write a PCI driver, for example, and that would be true. So little time is spent on each type that none are covered in enough detail to actually go off and start a driver of that type.

Like other reviews have stated, this first half of this book is a concise, useful introduction to certain Linux kernel concepts. It discusses implementation in detail, which this book does not.

It just feels like a reduced scope with increased depth on the remainder would have made a much more useful book, rather than a bathroom reader. But the title of the book leads the reader to expect that they could produce a Linux device driver using this book.

In short, while the O'Reilly "Linux Device Drivers" text has it's shortcomings and is starting to become dated, it is still the only text with which the reader can use as a primary reference to create their own driver.