Beautiful Code

Chapter 16. The Linux Kernel Driver Model: The Benefits of Working Together

Greg Kroah-Hartman

The linux kernel driver model attempts to create a system-wide tree of all different types of devices managed by the operating system. The core data structures and code used to do this have changed over the years from a very simplistic system meant for handling a few devices to a highly scalable system that can control every different type of device that the real world needs to interact with.

As the Linux kernel has evolved over the years, handling more and more different types of devices,^[39] the core of the kernel has had to change and evolve in order to come up with easier and more manageable ways to handle the range of device types.

Almost all devices consist of two different portions: the physical portion that defines how the operating system talks to the device (be it through the PCI bus, SCSI bus, ISA bus, USB bus, etc.) and the virtual portion that defines how the operating system presents the device to the user so that it can be operated properly (keyboard, mouse, video, sound, etc.). Through the 2.4 kernel releases, each physical portion of devices was controlled by a bus-specific portion of code. This bus code was responsible for a wide range of different tasks, and each individual bus code had no interaction with any other bus code.

In 2001, Pat Mochel was working on solving the issue of power management in the Linux kernel. He came to realize that in order to shut down or power ...