Arm-based Linux Driver Development Research

As the most promising applications of information industry, embedded technology has given birth to a huge industry. Linux integrates with embedded technology because of its low-cost, powerful, opening source codes. It makes products that base on embedded Linux are highly competitive on the market. The development of embedded Linux is reflected in three areas: bootloader and porting kernel, drivers'development, designing applications. Device driver likes bridge between the bottom and the top applications; therefore the development of device driver plays an important role in designing embedded Linux products. The researches on device driver are significant. This paper which focuses on embedded Linux device drivers, mostly researches on the following aspects:It describes the current situation and trend of embedded systems, and introduces the basic concepts of embedded systems. It mostly describes ARM processors family, composition of embedded Linux, the key technology in developing device drivers. This section contains programming of kernel module, Linux device model, polling and interrupt, mechanism in controlling concurrency.It studies on the key data structure and composition of the character device drivers. It pays great attention to design LCD driver on S3C2440A. And then develops random keyboard applications, this applications can be referred in security.It introduces the critical data structures of block device driver and functiones on I/O request processing, and designs RAMDISK block device drivers based on memory to improve the ability of developing block device drivers.It describes the architecture of TCP/IP network protocol in embedded Linux. In this section the paper mainly tells the development of DM9000EP network device driver, which focuses on the initializing, transmitting and receiving, interrupt handling and other functions. Then the embedded Linux system can be connected to internet.