Linux Device Drivers

Preface

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-2e, 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 eighties wasn’t powerful enough, at either the software or the hardware level--the internal design of the PC was much worse than that of the Apple-2e, and the available documentation for a long time was unsatisfying. But then Linux appeared, and I decided to give it a try by buying an expensive 386 motherboard and no commercial software at all.

At the time, I was using Unix systems at the university, and was greatly excited by the smart operating system, particularly when supplemented by the even smarter utilities that the GNU project donates to the user base. Running Linux on my own PC motherboard has always been an interesting experience, and I could even write my own device drivers and play with the soldering iron once again. I continue to tell people ``when I grow up, I wanna be a hacker,'' and Linux is the perfect platform for such dreams. That said, I don’t know if I will ever grow up.

As Linux matures, more and more people get interested in writing drivers for custom circuitry and for commercial devices. As Linus Torvalds noted, ``We’re back to the times when men were men and wrote their own device drivers.''

Not being able to write innovative code, ...