Linux Device Drivers Development

Resources and platform data

At the opposite end to hot-pluggable devices, the kernel has no idea what devices are present on your system, what they are capable of, or what they need in order to work properly. There is no auto-negotiation process, so any information provided to the kernel would be welcome. There are two methods to inform the kernel about the resources (IRQ, DMA, memory region, I/O ports, buses) and data (any custom and private data structure you may want to pass to the driver) that the device needs, which are discussed here.