Description
About
This course is designed to show experienced programmers how to develop device drivers for embedded Linux systems, and give them a basic understanding and familiarity with the Linux kernel.
Audience
This course is for developers interested in learning how to write device drivers for embedded Linux.
Prerequisites
Knowledge of basic kernel interfaces and methods such as how to write, compile, load and unload modules, use synchronization primitives, and the basics of memory allocation and management, such as is provided by LFD420 (Kernel Internals and Development).
Course Materials
Authorized printed training materials from The Linux Foundation. As part of your registration, a printed copy of the course manual will be course manual will be provided. If you are attending in person the material will be available onsite on the day the class begins.
Course Description
Developing Embedded Linux Device Drivers is designed to show experienced programmers how to develop device drivers for Linux systems, and give them a basic understanding and familiarity with the Linux kernel.
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.
Course Outline
- Introduction
- Preliminaries
- Cross-Development Toolchain
- Basic Target Development Board Setup
- Booting a Target Development Board over Ethernet
- Kernel Configuration, Compilation, Booting
- Device Drivers
- Modules and Device Drivers
- Memory Management and Allocation
- Character Devices
- Kernel Features
- Transferring Between User and Kernel Space
- Platform Drivers
- Device Trees
- Interrupts and Exceptions
- Timing Measurements
- Kernel Timers
- ioctls
- Unified Device Model and sysfs
- Firmware
- Sleeping and Wait Queues
- Interrupt Handling: Deferrable Functions and User Drivers
- Direct Memory Access (DMA)
- Memory Technology Devices
- USB Drivers
Why train with The Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation is the go-to source for training on virtually every aspect of Linux and many other open source technologies. Here are a few things that make The Linux Foundation the right choice for training:
- The Linux Foundation is the non-profit organization that hosts Linux and many other open source projects, employs Linux creator Linus Torvalds and hosts kernel.org (where all Linux kernel updates are released).
- Being so close to the kernel The Linux Foundation is constantly updating training to ensure that the most up-to-date information is being thought. Linux Foundation Training is unique in that all our training courses are designed to work on all major Linux distributions (including RedHat, Ubuntu and SUSE).
- The Linux Foundation does not sell any software or support services so there’s no hidden sales agenda in the training material. The only goal is to help students learn the material.
- When you train with The Linux Foundation, you’re learning from instructors who are comfortable across all major Linux distributions and can answer student questions regardless of the distribution you’re using for the class. You are truly learning from the experts.
