Linux Device Drivers Development

Linked lists

Imagine you have a driver that manages more than one device, let's say five devices. You may need to keep a track of each of them in your driver. What you need here is a linked list. Two types of linked list actually exist:

• Simply linked list
• Doubly linked list

Therefore, kernel developers only implement circular doubly linked lists because this structure allows you to implement FIFO and LIFO, and kernel developers take care to maintain a minimal set of code. The header to be added in the code in order to support lists is <linux/list.h>. The data structure at the core of list implementation in the kernel is the struct list_head structure, defined as the following:

struct list_head { 
    struct list_head *next, *prev; 
 }; 

The ...