Linux Kernel Internals and Device Driver Programming

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Description

  • Type

    Course

  • Methodology

    Online

Developers building embedded solutions using Linux often need to make kernel-level modifications, or to write drivers for custom hardware.

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Subjects

  • IT
  • Linux
  • Programming

Course programme

Linux Background

  • The evolution of Linux
  • Linux and the POSIX API
  • Understanding how the Linux Kernel is split up
  • The major differences between Linux 1.x and Linux 2.x
  • Key changes between Linux 2.4 and Linux 2.6

Linux Internals - the key parts

  • Memory addressing - segmentation and paging
  • Process creation, process switching, process destruction
  • Interrupts and Exception Handling
  • Time, timing and timer interrupts
  • Memory management and the process address space
  • System calls, signals and the POSIX API
  • I/O Devices
  • File systems - VFS, EXT2, Flash File Systems
  • Inter-process communication
  • Program loading and execution

Modules

  • Loadable modules and insmod
  • Security issues with loadable modules
  • Applications compared to kernel modules
  • User space, kernel space
  • Compiling and loading a module
  • Initialisation, shutdown and error handling by a module
  • Usage counting and module unloading
  • How a module acquires and accesses system resources (I/O Ports, I/O memory)
  • Automatic and manual configuration
  • User space drivers

Character Drivers

  • Major and minor device numbers
  • Dynamic allocation of major numbers
  • File operations - the file_operations structure and the file structure
  • Case study - Rubini and Corbet's scull device
  • Getting applications to use new devices

Device driver

  • Device driver testing and debugging
  • Using ioctl commands
  • Blocking vs. non-blocking I/O
  • Controlling access to a device

Time and the Linux Kernel

  • Timer interrupts and kernel time
  • Kernel time and the jiffies variable
  • Task queues
  • Understanding kernel timers
  • Tasklets and deferred work

Memory management - basics

  • kmalloc
  • Lookaside caches
  • vmalloc
  • Boot time memory allocation

Hardware management and usage - basics

  • I/O Ports and I/O Memory
  • Interrupts and Interrupt handling
  • The /proc interface
  • Circular buffers
  • Spinlocks
  • Race conditions

Block drivers

  • Registering
  • Handling requests - and data transfer
  • Queuing and block drivers
  • The ioctl command and block drivers

Case studies

  • USB device drivers
  • I2C and SPI device drivers
  • CAN device drivers
  • Bluetooth device drivers
  • Network device drivers
  • Overview of the Linux TCP/IP Protocol stack
  • TCP/IP over Ethernet
  • PPP over a dial-up modem connection
  • TCP/IP over USB
  • TCP/IP over Bluetooth
  • A/D and D/A for control applications

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Linux Kernel Internals and Device Driver Programming

Price on request

The best Unix and Linux courses

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