Linux Device Drivers Development

Coding style

Before going deep into this section, you should always refer to the kernel coding style manual, at Documentation/CodingStyle in the kernel source tree. This coding style is a set of rules you should respect, at least if you need to get patches accepted by kernel developers. Some of these rules concern indentation, program flow, naming conventions, and so on.

The most popular ones are:

• Always use a tab indentation of eight characters, and the line should be 80 columns long. If the indentation prevents you from writing your function, it is because this one has too many nesting levels. One can size the tabs and verify the line size using a scripts/cleanfile script from the kernel source:

scripts/cleanfile my_module.c 

• You can ...