Wanted to know how a device is detected in Linux? What exactly is the workflow of the device driver in device detection?
It is the Kernel's job to detect devices as it has the lowest level access to the available hardware. When the Kernel scans through all available addresses it maintains a list of Vendor and Device IDs.
To use PCI bus devices as an example, there is a Vendor ID and a Device ID associated with all PCI devices.
Device drivers are written in such a way as to identify to the Kernel what kinds of devices the driver is able to control. Drivers may advertise that they can handle more than one vendor and device type combination.
The Kernel will allocate a driver to each device based on these IDs. A similar process is in place for USB devices. Older technologies like legacy devices (serial ports, parallel, ps2 mice/keyboards) will have explicitly hardcoded methods of associating particular drivers with devices.
You can use the Linux commands lsusb and lspci to see the available devices and IDs on your system.
So in direct answer to your question - the device driver usually does nothing to detect the device, at least in the first instance. Once the driver is associated with a device (by the Kernel) the driver will likely do further interrogation of the device to ensure it contains the right firmware or is the right hardware revision, etc.
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I am writing a virtio driver for a device that is seen in the original driver as a platform device, that is the parent of a character device in the device tree.
In the tutorials that I followed, The virtio drivers are always done for "regular" character devices.
I wanted to create my virtio driver for it to expose a fake platform device as a parent of a "regular" character device.
My question is this one: Should I detect my virtual device in the regular way using the probe function and then create my platform device inside of it or is there a recommended way or order to create both (the platform device and the character device (child))?
When we get the virtio device and trigger the associated probe, we can then register a platform driver and then add some platform devices correponding to your needs.
And your device will appear as a platform device instead of a virtio_device in the guest OS.
I want to learn how Linux OS understands the underlying hardware.Can anyone suggest me where to start for getting this understanding,As of now i just know the '/dev' sub-directory plays a vital role in that.
It has the device special files which are like a portal to the device driver which then takes it to the physical device.
I read somewhere that Udev daemon listens to the netlink socket to collect this information and Udev device manager detects addition and removal of devices as they occur.
But with these i am just not satisfied with the thought of how Linux reads the hardware.
Please let me know where to start to understand this, i am so thankful to anyone trying to help.
I think at first you need to find out how the memory mapping works. What is the address space and how it relates to physical memory. Then you could read about how the hardware is mapped in address space and how to access it. It is a big amount of docs to read.
Some of those information are in Linux Documentation Project.
Additionally some knowledge about electronic would be helpful.
In general - Linux for communication with devices needs some "channel" of communication. This channel may be for example ISA, PCI, USB, etc bus. For example PCI devices are memory mapped devices and Linux kernel communicates with them via memory accesses. So first Linux needs to see given device in some memory area and then it is able to configure this device and do some communication with it.
In case of USB devices it is a little bit complicated because USB devices are not memory mapped. You need to configure USB host first to be able to communicate with USB devices. Every communication with USB device is achieved via USB host.
There are also devices which are not connected via ISA, PCI or USB. They are connected directly to the processor and visible under some memory address. This solution is usually implemented in embedded devices. For example ARM processors use this approach.
Regarding udev - it is user-space application which listens for events from Linux kernel and helps other applications with recognizing device addition and configuration.
I have a embedded device that runs linux 2.6.37.
I want my application to know when the USB is connected.
Currently I can achieve this by pooling
/sys/devices/platform/musb/musb-hdrc.0/vbus.
However this approach does not distinguish between a USB charger or a USB host.
I found this udev approach but I don't think it's available in my version of the kernel. because I did not find any USB related nodes in my /dev. This discussing also shows that it might not be feasible, ether.
I also found linux hotplug and tried the netlink example, but I didn't see any output running the example when I connect/disconnect the USB cable.
What I want to do is to detect connection type on the device, when USB is connected, and prepare (unmount file system) and switch to g_file_storage if device is connected to a host, and do nothing if device is connect to a charger.
How shall I achieve this?
To achieve that, you can use the inotify(7) feature, available in all linux kernels to be awaken as soon as some device node gets created in /sys.
To know what type of device you have, you have to read the usb info from proper usb ioctl call (or if you are not a kernel interface expert, using the libusb interface) to get the device vendor, device id and device class fields coming from the device. Normally, the hotplug software gets informed on these clase of events (via a special socket). The most probably reason you don't get the device properly initialized is some misconfiguration in the config files for udev system, which normally has one entry for each possible device vendor/device id pair and allows it to load the appropiate device driver to control it. The process continues with the device driver module creating dynamically the actual devices, and they'll appear in the /dev/ filesystem as a consequence of some other kernel event to udevd.
Read apropiate documents in <linux_src>/Documentation (this directory directory belongs to the linux kernel source code, so you'll probably need to install it), and udevd(8) man pages to be able to add a new usb.
On 2.6.37 kernel, this could be done by polling
/sys/devices/platform/musb-omap2430.0/musb-hdrc.0/mode
If handshake with host is successful then it will read as "peripheral", if fail it'll be "idle".
I am new to working on virtual USB device simulation in Linux. So far I have installed the virtual host control (vhci) libraries as per this tutorial (http://sourceforge.net/p/usb-vhci/wiki/Home/) and can see a virtual USB device being created which has some typical specifications that the library implements (Bus 05 in the image with the vendor and product IDs being "dead" and "beef" respectively).
However I want the created virtual device to have the specifications of a real device I have at hand (a mouse, for example).
So how to enumerate and initialize a virtual USB device with the same credentials as another device?
The kernel module (vhci-hcd) is only a (virtual) host controller that you can attach virtual devices to.
If you want to emulate eg a mouse you should get the libusb_vhci from the same source, and look into the examples. These are bare minimum starting points that does nothing except for the basic usb device handling. You'll have to extend this with all descriptors and protocol handling for a USB HID mouse or whatever you want to emulate.
http://www.usbmadesimple.co.uk/ums_5.htm should be a good starting point.
you can use lsusb and in particular lsusb -D to dump the descriptors of devices you have connected.
I've finished developing a pcie driver for an FPGA under a linux distributiuon. Everything works fine. But I'm wondering where the base address register in the PCI Endpoint of the FPGA gets the base address. When I've generated the PCIe Endpoint I was able to set up the length of the BAR, but not more.
In the PCIe driver I do the standard functions like pci_enable_device, but I do not set up specifically a base address.
So does the operating system set up the base address during startup? or how does it work?
By the side I would like to know what initialisations the operating system gernerally do if an pcie pcie device is connected. Since I do see my pci device in lspci even if the driver is unloaded.
Kind regards
Thomas
The address allocation for the PCI devices are generally done at the BIOS level. Let us refer to the x86 platform. If we look closely at the system address map, it would be something like this (image taken from BIOS DISASSEMBLY NINJUTSU, by Darmawan Salihun)
On the address map, there is a dedicated space to map the PCI memory regions. The same could be replicated using the output of /proc/iomem.
This implementation is platform dependent, and as the BIOS "knows" about the platform, it would set aside the addresses dedicated to the PCI slots. When a device is plugged into the slot, the BIOS interacts with the firmware on the device and actually sets up the memory regions for the device, such that the OS could make use of it.
Now coming to the drivers part. In Linux, the drivers follow a specific standard known as the 'Linux Device Model', which constitutes a Core Layer(PCI core), Host Controller Drivers(PCI Controller/Masters) and Client Drivers(PCI devices). When the PCI device(client) is plugged into the slot, the corresponding host controller knows about the attachment and it further informs the PCI core about it, and hence appears in the output of lspci.
lspci shows the devices which are identified by the host controller, in which case, it may or may not be tied to a driver. The core further traverses the drivers in the system, finds a matching one, and attaches to this device.
So, the reason you are seeing the device in the output of lspci is because the host controller has identified the device, and has informed the PCI core. It doesn't matter even if any driver is attached to the device or not.
On most consumer grade computers, BAR allocation seem to be done in the BIOS.
I suppose that in a hotplug capable architecture this must be done or at least triggered by the OS.