Write driver for laptop sensor - linux

I want to write a driver for sensor which can tell me if my yoga 2 pro is in tablet mode or not.
I read some about writting modules but as far as I know, I need to know address in memory which belongs to this device (hope it's correct), and here is my question.
How can I find information about this address?
Or what should I do to find this address?

Both in Windows and in Android you absolutely don't need to write a driver for this purpose. To identify Tablet/Laptop mode, you need just one sensor - accelerometer. In Windows 8.1 + this functionality is built-in, but in case you wish to build your own application you can use an example from here: https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsapps/Accelerometer-Sensor-Sample-22982671
In Android, you have a Java API to all sensors:
https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/sensors/sensors_overview.html
However if you have a custom Linux installed on your Yoga, there indeed may arise a need to add a driver. As of now, the most useful solution are IIO drivers that are part of Kernel:
http://events.linuxfoundation.org/sites/events/files/slides/lceu15_baluta.pdf
If there aren't already there, you'll have to rebuild a Kernel and include those drivers. If you don't know how to find a device address, you have to learn for a while about Linux Kernel in general. Anyway, some tips:
Sensors are normally defined via USB/HID interface
If you still have your Windows along with Linux, you may go to
Devices Manager and there you can easily reach Sensors and see what
address is used by a driver.

Related

Is it possible to add static kernel drivers to the Linux kernel of a distribution?

I may have a couple assumptions of Linux incorrect about the Linux system, and for that I apologize.
I have been educating myself on the Android and Linux systems for a while now and I started looking into installing a custom boot loader and Linux system onto an older Samsung tablet. Immediately upon looking into the feasibility of this, most of the answers I could find were that it wasn't possible because you would need the drivers that are being used by the android kernel to communicate with the OEM hardware in whatever Linux kernel you are installing.
I have one of these tablets rooted and I believe I may have found the drivers I need (not sure on that yet), and so I guess my question is, is it possible to take the drivers and put them into a Linux kernel within a distribution install image and install Linux on the device (using also a custom boot loader)?
I presume because someone hasn't done this before there is a pretty good reason why, but I am basically looking to be able to use Linux on my old tablet without the resources being taken from Android, and personally in my opinion, if I don't need Android and can install Linux straight on to the machine, then why keep it?
In the long run I am looking into LFS to create a custom distribution that can be installed on these tablets, but the most important question to me right now is if I do create this distribution can I get the drivers that the hardware needs (and even then will my kernel be able to use them?).
I also understand that some of these drivers may be proprietary drivers provided by the manufacturer, but I am not looking to profit off of this but instead research the feasibility of a better personal on-the-go computing setup.
I may be terribly wrong on how I may have described some things, so here are some of my assumptions:
The .ko files in the Android /lib/modules/ directory are the static kernel drivers I am looking for for that device.
The drivers aren't written for specifically the Android system, but for all Linux variants and would be compatible with another distribution.
If the drivers were written for the Android system, then one would be able to edit or modify those drivers to work with a different distribution.
One could "put the drivers into an installation image", or if not, then one would have to compile the kernel from source with those static drivers.
TL:DR, If this all just amounts to rambling, here are my specific questions:
Is it possible to copy the static kernel drivers of a rooted Android device to something like the SDcard?
Is it then possible to "put" or "compile" those same static drivers into a Linux distribution before installing it onto said tablet using something like Odin, or the like?

How to read hardware-level event information from touchscreen?

I'm working on a project to investigate the possibility of adding touch support to an application and so far the findings have been somewhat disappointing. My company uses Scientific Linux 6.4 (Linux kernel 2.6.32) and so far, I've found information suggesting that 2.6.30+ supports multi-touch HID, but I've also seen information suggesting that the multi-touch in this kernel doesn't work with Xorg interfaces.
Putting aside market availability of touchscreens that are compatible with Linux, is there a way we can verify whether or not multi-touch inputs are generated on the system? We have an older ViewSonic touchscreen that has multi-touch capability, and after looking at the output from the evtest tool, I didn't notice any multi-touch events, but I don't know whether evtest is reading the touch events from X or the hardware level.
I have no experience dealing with hardware programming or device drivers, so if anyone could give me some guidance on how to verify multi-touch HID compatibility with our version of Linux, whether we have to write our own driver, or read raw data from somewhere, any information you could provide would be great.
EDIT: The evtest program lists supported events for the device and I don't see anything related to multi-touch, so it doesn't seem like it's supported, but is this an issue with the kernel, the specific device, or something else? The specific monitor I'm testing is a ViewSonic, which is listed as a "Quanta Optical Touchscreen" device. I saw somewhere that a driver for Quanta was added in 2.6.34. Am I just out of luck (for this particular device at least)?
I went ahead and tested the monitor with a laptop that had Linux kernel 4.4.0, and it worked right away, so it seems that it's definitely the kernel. I don't know if there are any touchscreens that WILL work with kernel 2.6.32, but the ones based on the Quanta display definitely don't work.

Linux - Nic's flags configuration

Context
Debian 64 bit. kernel 3.18.x
Litterally struggling to understand how a network driver is initialized.
I mean how to choose which flag to set. I dig in the kernel for days now to train myself. The card setup is the only point I miss.
I take the intel 82574 as an example. I downloaded the card's datasheet, saw many information but not a clue on how to setup the hardware.
Question
Where to start to know what flags to set ? The datasheet didn't helped me (i am not very experienced but willing to learn).
Please give me a starting point, a tip or anything to help me understand what is going on in the already written open sourced driver.
How can a developer knows how to initialize his nic ? (yes reinventing the wheel the time to understand)
You'll need to read the source code of the kernel module that handles your specific NIC.
EDIT: Of course, to develop such a module, you'd usually just use a register map as specified in a data sheet or application node; often, manufacturers develop their linux drivers themselves, so the driver developers might even be the same people that developed the chipset (because it's really handy to have a platform to test against -- it's impossible to test hardware without having something like a driver, so you might as well write a proper driver).
Furthermore, devices often come with code examples -- no one is going to build a device based on an IC that he has not seen in action.
If you've got access to neither proper documentation nor source, you can only reverse engineer - and that's an incredibly large field.
Using your example with the Intel 82574 Network Adapter, Intel provides a zip file of the source code used to build the Linux driver. The driver is like all drivers in that it hooks into the OS API for Networking.
The Linux networking API is document on both the linux.org site and discussed on popular Linux sites like lwn.org. Below is the link to lwn's chapter on Network drivers using the networking API called NAPI.
https://static.lwn.net/images/pdf/LDD3/ch17.pdf
You'll notice in the Intel igb driver source code that the NAPI net_device data structure is one of the first things that is setup. It registers the driver with the OS. This way the OS knows which igb functions to call when loading/unloading the driver, or when needing to send/receive data.
The igb functions read/modify/write the necessary bits in the 82574's memory-mapped registers that control and monitor the device. The device registers are all documented in the 82574 datasheet available on Intel's site. And this is usually the case for almost any networking company like Broadcom/Chelsio/Mellanox/Marvell.
Hope that helps a little more.

Access GPIO on atom board

On this machine: http://www.nexcom.com/ProductModel.aspx?id=376f4fa5-64f3-41d1-afba-60ee48883465
I'm trying to access gpio, but neither Nexcom or Intel support has been very helpful.
The closest I've come is this blog post which says I have to write my own driver: http://geekswithblogs.net/BruceEitman/archive/2010/08/01/windows-ce-using-a-driver-to-readwrite-hardware-registers.aspx
From the nexcom manual it states gpio port is located at 0EE4H (0xEE4). What am I supposed to with this info? Am I really supposed to write my own driver?
edit: is must work on windows xp embedded and windows 7 embedded.
You can't directly access hardware resources (like GPIO pins) from userspace processes unless there's a driver that exposes this functionality. This means that either you find a suitable driver (I have no clue about where to look for such a thing) or you write your own.
p.s. It may also be the case that your OS expose the GPIO pins somewhere. On a linux prototyping board I worked on once there were a few files (IIRC /dev/gpioX, with X being the number of the pin) you could read/write to if you had the appropriate permissions.
You need GIVEIO.SYS.
It actually comes from Microsoft originally.
when you install it, you specify what port addresses you want.
then the user space program can access the ports directly.
You unix bretheren can just call ioperm() instead with the process running as a root. A shame MS didn't do that, but GIVEIO.SYS is okay.

Is there a way to ask the Linux Kernel to re-run its PCI initialization code?

I'm looking for either a kernel mode call that I can make from a driver, a userland utility, or a system call that will ask the Kernel to look at the PCI bus and either completely re-run its initialization, or initialize a specific device. Specifically, I need the Kernel to recognize a device that was added to the bus after boot and then configure its address space, interrupt, and other configuration parameters, and finally enable the device so that I can load the driver for it (unless this all happens as part of the driver load).
I'm stuck on the 2.4.x series Kernel for this, and am currently working with 2.4.20, but will be moving to 2.4.37 if it matters. The distro is a stripped down Red Hat 7.3 running in a ram disk, but I can add in whatever tools are needed to get this working (as long as they play nice with 2.4 series).
If some background would help clarify what I'm trying to do: From a cold boot, once in Linux I use GPIO to program an FPGA. Part of the FPGA, once programmed, implements a simple PCI device. Currently, after programming the FPGA, I reboot the system and Linux recognizes the device after coming up and loads the driver for it.
Instead of needing that reboot, I'd like to simply ask the Kernel to do whatever it does during boot up to find PCI devices (I have the Kernel configured to find PCI devices on its own, instead of asking the BIOS for that information, so the BIOS won't need to know about this device (I hope)).
I believe that Linux is capable of seeing the device after it is programmed but before a reboot, because scanpci will show the device after I program it, as will lspci -H 1. I just need a way to get it into /proc/pci, configured and enabled.
This below command will help the user to rescan it complete root hub.
echo "1" > /sys/class/pci_bus/0000\:00/rescan
You could speed up the reboot with kexec, if you don't figure out how to get the PCI scan redone. You could ask this on the LKML, if you haven't already.
unloading/reloading the module doesn't help, does it?
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/5633 suggests you should be able to do it with 2.4 kernels using pcihpfs.
If that isn't working, maybe the driver doesn't support hotplug?
It would probably crash the system if you reconfigured the addresses of other PCI devices while they are in use.
A better way would be to just configure the new card. If your kernel has support for Cardus devices, it already knows how to configure a newly-inserted PCI device (which is what Cardbus is). You just need to figure out how to get the kernel to do it...
It should be possible for a kernel module to do this. Even if you can't get built-in hotplug code, you should be able to set the pci resources using calls to pci_bus_write_config_dword() and friends. There is probably some IRQ routing setup to do as well.

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