Linux Device Driver Development

Chris Lydick Spring 2007

Class Schedule
CIS e(*i)
TU 10:30

Intro to Device Drivers

Lydick

PSYCH 012
EECE 92181 LAB 0

MWF
MWF F

11:30
9:30 2:30p

My Motivation
Reverse Engineering Demonstrations

Lydick
Lydick Lydick

Textbook List
J. Corbet, A Rubini, G Kroah-Hartman. Linux Device Drivers, 3rd Ed. Available for download online!
http://lwn.net/Kernel/LDD3/

Operating Systems 101

Ive not had Operating Systemsbut
Role of Device Drivers
Mechanism vs. Policy Black Box Semi/undefined interface (device) -> Well defined interface (Linux API)

Operating Systems 102

Uses C Language Gets complicated very quickly (lots of macros, code) Need to have a sense of ...
concurrency, race conditions interrupts, deferred work mutual exclusion kernel and user-space memories ****pointers, structures, (lots to consider)

Operating Systems 103

Textbook has provided lots of skeletons and demos (Wheew!) My testbed: Fedora Core 4, 2.6.11 (book requested 2.6.10)
Should we start with. Hello World?

Operating Systems 104

OK, easy So what.
Before digging deeper, consider 3 types of device drivers
Character Devices (stream of bytes) Block Devices (file systems) Network Interfaces (duh.)

Operating Systems 105

Char devices:
Scull (Simple Character Utility for Loading Localities) testbed for Char devices. Scull0..3 : global/persistent memory Scullpipe0..3 : FIFO pipes demonstrate contention Scullpriv : private data for each console

Operating Systems Lab Exercises

Scull0 demonstration Scullpipe0 demonstration Scullpriv demonstration Short (Temperature Sensor) Shortprint demonstration

13

Operating Systems Final

Other Areas of Interest:
Snull (network interface skeleton) USB-Skeleton (yep.) PCI-Skeleton (ok.) Sample Disk Driver (cool.) TTY Drivers, DMA and Memory Mapping, etc.

Motivation
My Thesis: Supercomputing Cluster in 031 Rathbone:
USB Connectivity: driver timeouts/overflows in OpenBSD Communicated with Chris Pascoe (OpenBSD Developer)

Motivation
Acer Labs M5632 Bridge Cable Worked fine using the standard USB 1.0 Driver Issues arose with the USB 2.0 (EHCI) driver [diff file]
Abused the kernel profiling framework to check at runtime for kernel stack overflows. Were switching to Linux (no issues), but its good to know how to dig into drivers right? Plus, isnt Linux supposed to be better than Windoze?

Reverse Engineering 101

Reverse Engineering: Getting something to work by watching it work when correctly loaded.
Usually occurs within Windows (sorry, we just cant get away from Microsoft!)

Reverse Engineering 102

USB Devices (URB):
USB Analyzer/Sniffer (Snoopy, USB Monitor,..) Acts similarly to Ethereal /sys/devices/pci0000:00/000:00:02.0/usb2/

PCI Bus
Hardware Sniffers (much more difficult to analyze!)

Conclusions
GET THE BOOK! Its very helpful and is a great reference! Examples are available for download Book is freely available (wget it before its gone!) Next step: USB!