The Research And Development Of Embedded Linux Device Drivers

Compared with other operation systems, the Linux operation system's safety and stability are excellent. And its program's source is open, thus users can develop their own embedded operation system, which is based on the Linux operation system. With those good qualities, the Linux operation system can be used in many fields. Wearable Computer's operation system is just based on the Linux operation system. Many devices are used on the Computer, so it becomes very significant to study these device drivers. The drivers which run efficiently and steadily can exert high capability of the computer peripheral equipments, and they are also the important factors of the reliability of the whole system.Device driver plays an important role in Linux kernel,it's the entrance to the world of Linux kernel.The research on embedded Linux device drivers helps deeply understand the Linux kernel code.Besides,the hardware can only work normally on condition that it has the matched device driver.The numerous categories of embedded device decides that different embedded device must have their own drivers,which makes the development of device driver programs have an important part in the work of embedded system development .Therefore,the researchment on embedded Linux device drivers has a great social and commercial value.Firstly, this paper introduces ARM device driver and the Linux device driver. Secondly the paper analyzes three kinds of devices drivers (including character device, block device, network device), and gives the common mesures and steps on those different kinds sevice driver programs' development. Those steps almost compete all the affairs in the device drivers related with kernel,including the device's register and unregister,open,close and write,unitive interface of system transferring,the method of transferring data from kernel memory to the user memory,and etc.The paper also describes detailedly the use of memory and the visiting method of device.On the basis of above things,a complete driver programme will be done only if the developer is acquainted with the hardware information like using method of peripheral device and data format.