Linux Device Drivers

Acknowledgments

This book isn’t completely mine: I’ve had external help both in hardware material and human support. I want to thank Mr. Dreyer of Quant-X for loaning me an Alpha computer so I could test portability of the sample code included in this book. Sun-Italia has been kind as well, by loaning me a Sparc machine; this allowed me to upgrade the box from their OS to mine. ImageNation helped by donating a PCI frame grabber, which I used to dissect PCI and DMA features.

Surely this book would never have been finished without the help of Andy Oram and Michael Johnson, and the psychological support of Federica, my girlfriend--ehm, wife. Andy has been my mighty editor, and Michael is the one who asked me to write for the Linux Journal and then sent me to Andy—if someone is guilty for this work, that’s Michael. I’d like to thank Georg van Zezschwitz, who introduced me to the fascinating world of kernel modules and helped in writing for the Linux Journal. I want to thank Silvana Ranzoli, my teacher of English at high school, for her relentless (though sometimes perceived as cruel) commitment to the benefit of her classroom. I am grateful to Ellen Siever, who fixed all the linguistic misfeatures I learned after high school; she patiently dealt with my tendency towards hackerisms and subtleties—I’m never satisfied with rewritings.

My text has been technically reviewed by Alan Cox, Greg Hankins, Hans Lermen, Heiko Eissfeldt, and Miguel de Icaza (in alphabetic order by first name). Their ...