Rodolfo Giometti - Linux Device Driver Development Cookbook

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Rodolfo Giometti is an engineer, IT specialist, GNU/Linux expert and software libre evangelist. He is the author of the books BeagleBone Essentials, BeagleBone Home Automation Blueprints and GNU/Linux Rapid Embedded Programming by Packt Publishing and maintainer of the LinuxPPS projects. He still actively contributes to the Linux source code with several patches and new device drivers for industrial applications devices.

During his 20+ years of experience, he has worked on the x86, ARM, MIPS, and PowerPC-based platforms.

Now, he is the co-chief at HCE Engineering S.r.l., where he designs new hardware and software systems for the quick prototyping in industry environment, control automation, and remote monitoring.

Cristian Marussi earned his bachelor's degree in Computer Science at the University of Udine (Italy), and spent almost 15 years working with embedded Linux. Cristian has been lucky enough to journey all the way through the software stack, from the userspace down to the lands of the kernel and firmware, while spanning a wide set of different products, from network appliances to consumer mobile devices. He has a keen interest in OS and system software development and internals. He has worked for companies such as Eurotech SPA, VDS Rail, and Samsung Cambridge Solution Center; he is currently a kernel developer in the OSS department at ARM Ltd. in Cambridge (UK).
Antonio Tringali is an electronic engineer working as a freelancer. He specializes in automation and remote system control. Most of his work in recent years is concentrated on automated parking systems, security access control, renewable energy data processing, and 3D printers. He likes to work from the silicon up, equally at ease with an oscilloscope as he is with a compiler.

Antonio had the pleasure of getting to know Rodolfo years ago, when writing for the same leading Italian Linux magazine. In 2015, he reviewed another of Rodolfo's books, BeagleBone Essentials. Now, he is eagerly awaiting the next book to come from this prolific author's keyboard.

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Kernel device driver development is one of the most important parts of a complex operating system, which is what Linux is. Device drivers are very important for developers that use a computer as a monitoring or administrative machine in real environments such as industry, domestic, or medical applications. In fact, even if Linux is now widely supported everywhere, new peripherals are created every day, and these devices need drivers to be efficiently used on a GNU/Linux machine.

This book will present the implementation of a complete character driver (usually called a char driver) by presenting all the necessary techniques to exchange data between the kernel and userspace, to implement process synchronization with the peripheral's interrupts, to get access to I/O memory mapped to (internal or external) devices, and to efficiently manage the time within the kernel.

All code presented in this book is compatible with Linux 4.18+ releases (that is, as far as the latest 5.x kernels). The code can be tested on the Marvell ESPRESSObin, which has an onboard ARM 64-bit CPU, but any other similar GNU/Linux embedded device can be used. In this manner, the readers can verify whether what they have read has been correctly understood.