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Linux Device Drivers, 3rd Edition
book

Linux Device Drivers, 3rd Edition

by Jonathan Corbet, Alessandro Rubini, Greg Kroah-Hartman
February 2005
Beginner to intermediate
636 pages
22h 51m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Linux Device Drivers, 3rd Edition

Chapter 18. TTY Drivers

A tty device gets its name from the very old abbreviation of teletypewriter and was originally associated only with the physical or virtual terminal connection to a Unix machine. Over time, the name also came to mean any serial port style device, as terminal connections could also be created over such a connection. Some examples of physical tty devices are serial ports, USB-to-serial-port converters, and some types of modems that need special processing to work properly (such as the traditional WinModem style devices). tty virtual devices support virtual consoles that are used to log into a computer, from either the keyboard, over a network connection, or through a xterm session.

The Linux tty driver core lives right below the standard character driver level and provides a range of features focused on providing an interface for terminal style devices to use. The core is responsible for controlling both the flow of data across a tty device and the format of the data. This allows tty drivers to focus on handling the data to and from the hardware, instead of worrying about how to control the interaction with user space in a consistent way. To control the flow of data, there are a number of different line disciplines that can be virtually “plugged” into any tty device. This is done by different tty line discipline drivers.

As Figure 18-1 shows, the tty core takes data from a user that is to be sent to a tty device. It then passes it to a tty line discipline driver, ...

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ISBN: 0596005903Errata Page