Understanding the Linux Kernel, 3rd Edition

Chapter 13. I/O Architecture and Device Drivers

The Virtual File System in the last chapter depends on lower-level functions to carry out each read, write, or other operation in a manner suited to each device. The previous chapter included a brief discussion of how operations are handled by different filesystems. In this chapter, we look at how the kernel invokes the operations on actual devices.

In the section "I/O Architecture,” we give a brief survey of the 80 × 86 I/O architecture. In the section "The Device Driver Model,” we introduce the Linux device driver model. Next, in the section "Device Files,” we show how the VFS associates a special file called “device file” with each different hardware device, so that application programs can use all kinds of devices in the same way. We then introduce in the section "Device Drivers" some common characteristics of device drivers. Finally, in the section "Character Device Drivers,” we illustrate the overall organization of character device drivers in Linux. We’ll defer the discussion of block device drivers to the next chapters.

Readers interested in developing device drivers on their own may want to refer to Jonathan Corbet, Alessandro Rubini, and Greg Kroah-Hartman’s Linux Device Drivers, Third Edition (O’Reilly).