Developing Embedded Linux Device Drivers (LFD435)

Upon mastering this material, you will be familiar with the different kinds of device drivers used under Linux, and have an introduction to many of the appropriate APIs to be used when writing a device driver. The labs for illustrating these concepts will all be performed on ARM hardware in order to get developers familiar with cross-compiling and developing drivers for an embedded target. The included development kit (yours to keep) will be used to illustrate testing kernel drivers using TFTP and NFSroot techniques.

While we will discuss kernel internals and algorithms we will examine deeply only the functions which are normally used in device drivers. More details on things such as scheduling, memory management, etc., belong more properly in a different, kernel-focused course.

1. Introduction
2. Preliminaries
3. Cross-Development Toolchain
4. Basic Target Development Board Setup
5. Booting a Target Development Board over Ethernet
6. Kernel Configuration, Compilation, Booting
7. Device Drivers
8. Modules and Device Drivers
9. Memory Management and Allocation
10. Character Devices
11. Kernel Features
12. Transferring Between User and Kernel Space
13. Platform Drivers
14. Device Trees
15. Interrupts and Exceptions
16. Timing Measurements
17. Kernel Timers
18. ioctls
19. Unified Device Model and sysfs
20. Firmware
21. Sleeping and Wait Queues
22. Interrupt Handling: Deferrable Functions and User Drivers
23. Direct Memory Access (DMA)
24. Memory Technology Devices
25. USB Drivers