Skip to Content
Mastering Embedded Linux Programming - Second Edition
book

Mastering Embedded Linux Programming - Second Edition

by Chris Simmonds
June 2017
Intermediate to advanced
478 pages
13h 14m
English
Packt Publishing
Content preview from Mastering Embedded Linux Programming - Second Edition

The role of device drivers

As I mentioned in Chapter 4, Configuring and Building the Kernel, one of the functions of the kernel is to encapsulate the many hardware interfaces of a computer system and present them in a consistent manner to user space programs. The kernel has frameworks designed to make it easy to write a device driver, which is the piece of code that mediates between the kernel above and the hardware below. A device driver maybe written to control physical devices such as a UART or an MMC controller, or it may represent a virtual device such as the null device (/dev/null) or a ramdisk. One driver may control multiple devices of the same kind.

Kernel device driver code runs at a high privilege level, as does the rest of the ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.

Read now

Unlock full access

More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

QuotationMarkO’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
QuotationMarkI wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
QuotationMarkI’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
QuotationMarkI'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Mark W.
Embedded Software Engineer

You might also like

Mastering Embedded Linux Programming

Mastering Embedded Linux Programming

Chris Simmonds
Hands-On System Programming with Linux

Hands-On System Programming with Linux

Kaiwan N. Billimoria, Tigran Aivazian

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781787283282