Linux Device Drivers, Second Edition

Preface

This is, on the surface, a book about writing device drivers for the Linux system. That is a worthy goal, of course; the flow of new hardware products is not likely to slow down anytime soon, and somebody is going to have to make all those new gadgets work with Linux. But this book is also about how the Linux kernel works and how to adapt its workings to your needs or interests. Linux is an open system; with this book, we hope, it will be more open and accessible to a larger community of developers.

Much has changed with Linux since the first edition of this book came out. Linux now runs on many more processors and supports a much wider variety of hardware. Many of the internal programming interfaces have changed significantly. Thus, the second edition. This book covers the 2.4 kernel, with all of the new features that it provides, while still giving a look backward to earlier releases for those who need to support them.

We hope you’ll enjoy reading this book as much as we have enjoyed writing it.

Alessandro’s Introduction

As an electronic engineer and a do-it-yourself kind of person, I have always enjoyed using the computer to control external hardware. Ever since the days of my father’s Apple IIe, I have been looking for another platform where I could connect my custom circuitry and write my own driver software. Unfortunately, the PC of the 1980s wasn’t powerful enough, at either the software or the hardware level: the internal design of the PC is much worse than that ...