Understanding the Linux Kernel, 3rd Edition

Device Drivers

A device driver is the set of kernel routines that makes a hardware device respond to the programming interface defined by the canonical set of VFS functions (open, read, lseek, ioctl, and so forth) that control a device. The actual implementation of all these functions is delegated to the device driver. Because each device has a different I/O controller, and thus different commands and different state information, most I/O devices have their own drivers.

There are many types of device drivers . They mainly differ in the level of support that they offer to the User Mode applications, as well as in their buffering strategies for the data collected from the hardware devices. Because these choices greatly influence the internal structure of a device driver, we discuss them in the sections "Direct Memory Access (DMA)" and “Buffering Strategies for Character Devices.”

A device driver does not consist only of the functions that implement the device file operations. Before using a device driver, several activities must have taken place. We’ll examine them in the following sections.

Device Driver Registration

We know that each system call issued on a device file is translated by the kernel into an invocation of a suitable function of a corresponding device driver. To achieve this, a device driver must register itself. In other words, registering a device driver means allocating a new device_driver descriptor, inserting it in the data structures of the device driver model (see ...