Can some one please give us code for controlling gpio and on board led from a C program and which also has shared memory communication
Follow the link for gpio-control code.
What you mean by "which also has shared memory communication" and Why do you need it is unclear from your question?
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I am looking forward to learn writing a typical linux device driver. Can anyone guide me how can i learn all the aspects of a typical linux device driver ? The examples i see on internet are way too simple, they just send a "hello world" msg from user space to kernel driver module, and echo back "hello". I want to touch almost all areas in a simple way, one would face in writing a real world driver. Would i need to have a real hardware to go forward to meet my requirement ? Cannot system's memory simulate the hardware peripheral and let me treat it as a hardware and control it vie kernel driver covering good set of operations ? Any examples/guidance for this ?
Take a look at the following example of network driver. It uses QEMU for development and testing.
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/1087177/Linux-Ethernet-Driver-using-Qemu
Sample drivers usually don't control real hardware. The QEMU answer mentioned here is a good exception I guess.
It depends what type of driver you want to focus on. Most classes of drivers distributed with the kernel have some simpler drivers you can learn from. Nbd for example is great for block subsystem and loop devices:
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/c05c2ec96bb8b7310da1055c7b9d786a3ec6dc0c/drivers/block/nbd.c
Look at the smallest file sizes in a drivers/xyz directory and go up until the code is too complex.
I am a complete newbie to operating system and aiming to write my own kernel.
I understand that i will have to write my own device drivers as well.
How do i start with writing my driver?
The tasks of project are as follows.
1.Defining GDT in assembly language
2.Creating boot sector
3.Interrupt handling
4.Screen Driver
5.Keyboard driver
6.Hard disk driver
7.File system
8.I/O programming
9.Physical memory management
Also is it possible to do this in 3 months ( team of 2 )
As you know (or about to find out) OSes are extremely complicated and interconnected. For example, how are you going to have a working Keyboard driver before you have implemented interrupt handling?
It sounds like your question actually is: "How do I start writing my own OS?" You start by reading "Required Knowledge," "Beginner Mistakes," and "Getting Started" on osdev.
Good luck, and it is going to take a long time... especially if you are learning as you go (which is okay, since your goal is learning and not to make a commercial OS).
Edit: Modifying the Linux kernel is a good way to learn about the internals of an OS. It will let you focus on individual aspects (such as just writing a keyboard driver) and your work environment will be sane. Depending on what you want to do, you will be able to further ease development by creating a kernel module instead directly modifying the kernel.
Define your project and its scope
Set up your work environment (my suggestion, run Ubuntu Server in QEMU)
Learn how to either boot a custom kernel or use the module system
Get to work!
You can try looking into contributing to minix (http://www.minix3.org/)
There are a loads of things that are needed to be done .Have a look at (http://wiki.minix3.org/Wishlist).
I have an embedded board with a kernel module of thousands of lines which freeze on random and complexe use case with random time. What are the solution for me to try to debug it ?
I have already try magic System Request but it does not work. I guess that the explanation is that I am in a loop or a deadlock in a code where hardware interrupt is disable ?
Thanks,
Eva.
Typically, embedded boards have a watch dog. You should enable this timer and use the watchdog user process to kick the watch dog hard ware. Use nice on the watchdog process so that higher priority tasks must relinquish the CPU. This gives clues as to the issue. If the device does not reset with a watch dog active, then it maybe that only the network or serial port has stopped communicating. Ie, the kernel has not locked up. The issue is that there is no user visible activity. The watch dog is also useful if/when this type of issue occurs in the field.
For a kernel lockup case, the lockup watchdogs kernel features maybe useful. This will work if you have an infinite loop/deadlock as speculated. However, if this is custom hardware, it is also possible that SDRAM or a peripheral device latches up and causes abnormal bus activity. This will stop the CPU from fetching proper code; obviously, it is tough for Linux to recover from this.
You can combine the watchdog with some fallow memory that is used as a trace buffer. memmap= and mem= can limit the memory used by the kernel. A driver/device using this memory can be written that saves trace points that survive a reboot. The fallow memory's ring buffer is dumped when a watchdog reset is detected on kernel boot.
It is also useful to register thread notifiers that can do a printk on context switches, if the issue is repeatable or to discover how to make the event repeatable. Once you determine a sequence of events that leads to the lockup, you can use the scope or logic analyzer to do some final diagnosis. Or, it maybe evident which peripheral is the issue at this point.
You may also set panic=-1 and reboot=... on the kernel command line. The kdump facilities are useful, if you only have a code problem.
Related: kernel trap (at web archive). This link may no longer be available, but aren't important to this answer.
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I'd like to know this for the first boot and for subsequent boots.
I'm compiling my own kernel and want it to be as lean as possible. I want to build the .config file by hand (mainly as a learning experience), so I need to know everything that can be excluded. I know a possible solution is to look at my current distros list of loaded drivers. However, I'm curious about how my distro discovered what drivers to load initially.
TIA.
How does the Linux kernel know which drivers to load at boot?
The kernel generates events for devices on e.g. the PCI bus when they are plugged (either hot or cold; events are queued until userspace runs AFAIR). udev will receive these events and do modprobe calls which include the PID/VID (product/vendor IDs) of the device(s); this is usually a string with some * in it. modprobe will then calculate the intersection of the set expressed by udev's load request wildcard and the set of aliases of kernel modules (themselves being possibly wildcards).
Since USB/Firewire/etc. controllers are usually attached to the PCI bus, that's how your HCI driver gets loaded. That is how things recurse down; loading is then done with USB/Firewire PID/VIDs of course.
Network protocol modules (e.g. ipv6) are however not dealt with through udev; instead, when a program calls socket(AF_INET6, ...) the kernel directly calls modprobe (more precisely: whatever is in /proc/sys/kernel/modprobe) with a non-wildcarded alias, net-pf-10 in case of IPv6, because AF_INET6 happens to have value 10. modprobe then loads ipv6.ko, because that is what has the net-pf-10 alias.
Similarly for filesystems, attempting to mount -t foo will cause the kernel to also call modprobe (again, via ____call_usermodehelper), this time with foo as argument.
Accessing device nodes (e.g. /dev/loop0, provided it already exists) has the same strategy if loop.ko is not already loaded. The kernel here requests block-major-7-0 (because loop0 usually has (7,0), cf. ls -l), and loop.ko has the fitting block-major-7-* alias.
Greg Kroah give an excellent example on how to find exactly which drivers you need for you kernel. Kindly Greg gives his book away for free online
http://files.kroah.com/lkn/
A quote from Greg's books
I'm especially proud of the chapter on how to figure out how to configure
a custom kernel based on the hardware running on your machine. This is an
essential task for anyone wanting to wring out the best possible speed and
control of your hardware.
I need some directions to start learning about programming my own operating system kernel.
Just for educational purpouses.
How can I write my own Kernel?
I would first ask: why did you pick "writing a kernel?" Any answer other than "the idea of implementing my own task structures in memory to be swapped by a scheduler that I write and using memory that is managed by code that I wrote and is protected by abstractions of machine-level atomic instructions and is given I/O access through abstractions that sit atop actual hardware interfaces appeals to me" is probably a bad answer that indicates you haven't done any research whatsoever and are wasting your time.
If you answered similarly to the above, then you have a good starting point and you know what you need to research (that is, you are able to pinpoint to some degree what information you do not know but need to find out).
Either way, I don't think this question is worth asking. In one case, you have done no research of your own to discover if you can actually do this, and in the other case you asked an overly-broad question.
It isn't that hard, but you need to learn about proper resource management and low-level device I/O. If you're targeting a commodity x86 box, then you'll need to learn about how the BIOS works and how the disk is structured. For example, the BIOS will read the first block of the disk into memory at some fixed address and then jump to that address. Since there probably won't be enough space in one block to store your kernel, you'll need to write a boot loader to read your kernel off the disk and load it.
Writing a minimal kernel that does some simple multitasking and performs I/O using just the BIOS isn't too difficult, just don't expect to be throwing up any windows and mousing around any time soon. You'll be busy trying to implement a simple file system and getting read() and write() to work.
Maybe you can start by looking into OS/161, which is a Harvard's simplified operating system for educational purposes. The OS runs on a simulator, so you don't need a new machine to run it. I used it for my operating system course, and it really did help a lot.
Also I think you may really want to consider taking an operating system course if you haven't done so.