[Chugalug] Book Rave-iew: Linux Device Drivers

[Dan Lyke]

In this post-Google age, I'd largely thought O'Reilly books had become
irrelevant. Though Google's results seem to be getting worse, I can
largely find out how and why to use various tools much faster in a
browser than by going back to my bookshelf.

However, an acquaintance I met at the Santa Rosa Perl Monger's (the
sort of pm where people demo hand-soldering jobs and feeding data from
sensors into spreadsheets by way of Perl) and I were talking about
making ARM systems scream, and he recommended Linux Device Drivers,
by Corbet, Rubini & Kroah-Hartman.

It ain't light reading, but it really nicely looks like it walks that
line between the deep theory and the "you've gotta get a solution by
tomorrow evening. Go!" depth of things, and I've learned a lot about
why certain things that filter up into the user layer work the way they
do.

It walks through a couple of different drivers, one dummy driver that
just prints out stuff, another which accesses parallel ports, and then
a bunch of theory on dealing with USB and PCI and the like, and a few
strategies for dealing with direct hardware access in user space.

It's a little more Intel centric than I'd like, but I feel like
reading this has been a really productive morning.

If you're the sort of person who ever ends up using MAKEDEV, or has to
figure out how to squeeze a little more performance out of a server
application, this one's worth some airplane reading.

Dan