Linux Device Drivers Development

Kernel structure allocation/initialization

The kernel always offers two possible allocation mechanisms for its data structures and facilities.

Some of these structures are:

• Workqueue
• List
• Waitqueue
• Tasklet
• Timer
• Completion
• mutex
• spinlock

Dynamical initializers are all macros, which means they are always capitalized: INIT_LIST_HEAD(), DECLARE_WAIT_QUEUE_HEAD(), DECLARE_TASKLET( ), and so on.

These are all discussed in Chapter 3, Kernel Facilities and Helper Functions. Data structures that represent framework devices are always allocated dynamically, each having its own allocation and deallocation API. These framework device types are:

• Network
• Input device
• Char device
• IIO device
• Class
• Framebuffer
• Regulator
• PWM device
• RTC

The scope of the ...