Sreekrishnan Venkateswaran

This book is intended to teach an intermediate level programmer who is already proficient in the "C" language to write device drivers for the Linux operating system. The book covers Linux kernel 2.6-23/24 versions which just happens to be the version I was using with my Ubuntu 8.04 laptop at the time of my review.

The author is clearly an experienced device driver programmer and he has a first rate command of written English. I found his writing to be clear, well organized and most importantly capable of teaching me how to work with kernel sources that are actively in use. He does an excellent job of explaining the environment in which modern device drivers will be used and he covers all of the major categories of devices that a programmer would need. This book thoroughly covers these categories in enough detail to get the programmer started writing drivers. I particularly liked his mentioning several source code analysis tools that are commonly used by those having to work with kernel sources. At least two of the tools, cscope and ctags, I used when working on kernel maintenance for Digital Equipment Corporation. These tools made it possible to browse through the symbols used in the kernel and also to allow one to see where the corresponding name was declared and where it was accessed (read or written).

The author gives a high level explanation of each driver type covered and then helps the reader navigate the relevant source code files in the kernel source tree.

I was also pleasantly surprised to find that the author had more than a passing acquaintance with embedded Linux having participated in a number of driver projects for embedded Linux devices. As you might expect in a book on device drivers the author describes the major routines used for a class of device drivers, where the routine can be found (file/tree structure), a full explanation of how the routines are used and the functions they perform. The author presents the reader with device driver code for devices that would need drivers and also shows how they would be integrated into the existing device driver structure for the class of device presented.

The final chapters of his book describe user space device drivers, miscellaneous device drivers (ACPI, Firewire etc). He has an excellent chapter on debugging device drivers which covers kernel debuggers, kernel probes as well as kernel exec and kdump. He offers a sample debugging section for a buggy driver. He also covers kernel execution profiling and tracing.

The book index is well done allowing the reader to quickly pinpoint items of interest. Book indexing is to some extent an art form and Prentice Hall does an especially good job with their technical books.

Overall I'd give this book a high rating and it's good enough that I will add a copy to my personal library.… (plus d'informations)