Linux Device Drivers in Just a Few Years
[Johannes 4GNU_Linux] has been filming a series of videos on how to write Linux device drivers for a few years now, but luckily you won't need that long to watch them or create your own driver. He's added a few recent videos to the series, like the one below, but might want to go back a few years and start over.
If you're creating your own hardware for Linux, you'll probably eventually want to write a driver that runs as a privileged program. While there's a lot you can do in userspace, for ultimate control and performance, you can't beat a pilot.
One problem, however, is that drivers can really crash your system in a big way. Previously, it was common to have a system dedicated to driver development. Today, for many drivers, you can get away with running a virtual machine that you can crash and reload without too much trouble.
The videos cover a variety of topics such as interrupts, completions, polls, and threads. It even uses a Raspberry Pi, which will be very useful for many embedded projects. Of course, the current trend is to have a driver - like the USB driver - and provide userspace access to it so that everyone doesn't have to write their own drivers. But, as usual, it doesn't go any further.
We don't know how many more videos there will be, but if you make it through the first 31, maybe more will be waiting for you. It's been a while since we looked at SPI drivers on Linux. As an example of why you might want to roll your own, consider a custom FPGA driver.
[Johannes 4GNU_Linux] has been filming a series of videos on how to write Linux device drivers for a few years now, but luckily you won't need that long to watch them or create your own driver. He's added a few recent videos to the series, like the one below, but might want to go back a few years and start over.
If you're creating your own hardware for Linux, you'll probably eventually want to write a driver that runs as a privileged program. While there's a lot you can do in userspace, for ultimate control and performance, you can't beat a pilot.
One problem, however, is that drivers can really crash your system in a big way. Previously, it was common to have a system dedicated to driver development. Today, for many drivers, you can get away with running a virtual machine that you can crash and reload without too much trouble.
The videos cover a variety of topics such as interrupts, completions, polls, and threads. It even uses a Raspberry Pi, which will be very useful for many embedded projects. Of course, the current trend is to have a driver - like the USB driver - and provide userspace access to it so that everyone doesn't have to write their own drivers. But, as usual, it doesn't go any further.
We don't know how many more videos there will be, but if you make it through the first 31, maybe more will be waiting for you. It's been a while since we looked at SPI drivers on Linux. As an example of why you might want to roll your own, consider a custom FPGA driver.
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