Are there whatsoever some kinds of directives linux kernel developers go for, especially when writing drivers? - How drivers in the linux kernel are maintained. How can I (as a normal distro User) say if a driver works performant and is not just functioning.
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I want to start some Linux development for my research. Writing few simple scheduling algorithms and test them. I have few questions:
1) How do you develop for the linux kernel? IDE? How do you import the kernel files and see how they are related or connected?
2) Once you write your code, how do you simulate/debug it? I mean one can't just build the kernel for 20 - 30 minutes, make a new image and change boot.ini each time. This is a lenghty process plus you can't simulate or debug just observe if it works or not.
3) Is there A guide for starting developing in Linux. I find the lack of documentation surprising
I am developing for ARM-based boards
Excuse my ignorance.
Thanks
How do you develop for Linux kernel?
There are many components in the Linux kernel. Typically, kernel is divided into core and driver parts.
Core includes scheduling, MMU, memory management, process management etc
Drivers includes file system, networking, peripheral device drivers, USB etc
IDE is not a must to develop kernel code. For kernel veterans, VIM/nano is also OK. The development environment is up to you. If you are new to the kernel code, you want to build the function relationship views, some tools can be helpful:
Source Insight (Commercial)
vim + ctags (http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Single_tags_file_for_a_source_tree)
How to debug it?
There are many Linux favors/distributions. You can use Software emulator or Hardware boards to debug the kernel. Android is based on Linux and there are many mobile phones or development boards that support Android. iOS is also derived from Linux and it is its own debug method.
Where to find the kernel documents?
For kernel part, there are many readme articles in kernel source tree. e.g. http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/Documentation/debugging-via-ohci1394.txt
printk is powerful enough for newbies.
For ARM part, there are many articles in infocenter.arm.com
Debugging Linux kernels using DS-5
http://infocenter.arm.com/help/topic/com.arm.doc.den0024a/ch18s03s03.html?resultof=%22%6b%65%72%6e%65%6c%22%20
The reason i am interested is that there is an everlasting problem with linux and proprietary drivers. Why hardware vendors do not ship their drivers in LLVM IR form?
You can write Linux device drivers in user mode code. I have seen demonstrations written in Python (handy for prototyping).
Presumably your idea is that hardware vendors could ship a LLVM IR driver, and then the driver would work with x86, ARM, or anything else? Most hardware vendors are not interested in niche-markets, and only want to support their hardware on particular platforms that they have tested on.
There is very rarely any interesting IPR in a driver (although there may well be in the library on top of the driver). If vendors wanted to support multiple platforms, they could just ship C code with instructions to build, and a restrictive (or even GPL) license.
I have a fairly large PCIe driver written on/for Linux, now I need to port it on FreeBSD. I don't yet know the BSD version, but I think at this point it's irrelevant, as I'd like to understand in general what major items will have to be modified during the porting efforts.
The good thing is that the driver is partitioned into OS independent "library" layer (OSI) and OS dependent, so it already has a "framework" permitting to port it on other OS-es, and I hope most of the efforts will be focused on OSI side. So far I see the following big chunks of work:
init code, i.e. the OS-specific code that "plugs" the driver into
system (similar to what init_module, cleanup_module does in Linux)
code registering driver in a PCI core subsystem of the kernel
character driver registration code 4) DMA operations
What else should I be paying attention to? This driver is a device doing hardware encryption, so it is offload device (ingress packets from NIC enter system normally and then diverted to the device).
If there are useful web links to description of BSD drivers development/porting (similar to LDD), I'd happily accept it :)
In 2011, Jeff Roberson (and later Mellanox) added some shims to ease porting Linux drivers, which makes most of the code be used as-is, when he ported the Linux InfiniBand drivers to FreeBSD. So, assuming I am some newcomer from Linux driver development world, I'd start by looking at:
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/sys/ofed/include/linux/
Where you would find implementations of many required Linux driver API and their FreeBSD native counterpart.
There is another quickstart document by John-Mark, here, helpful for those who are already familiar with driver writing.
If you would prefer starting from the beginning, I think the FreeBSD Architecture Handbook would be an useful start point.
Additionally, there is a book by Kirk McKusick, Robert Watson and George Neville-Neil, titled "The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System", the latest version at this time is 2nd edition, and the chapter 8 detailed device drivers.
Most device drivers are merely wrappers of hardware operation to fit OS interfaces, so a well layered driver should be relatively easy to port nowadays.
If you have questions, or is a vendor of hardware, you can also join various FreeBSD mailing lists (freebsd-drivers#, etc.).
This might be a stupid question but I am confused and google couldn't help.
I know Linux is the Kernel which is the heart of many distros( Ubuntu, Mint). But when we say "Linux kernel programming", what do we exactly mean? Is it Bash scripting?
And how it is related to the device driver development? (Do we mean that the hardware is running linux kernel and we do kernel programming to support peripherals, this is ,in general, device driver development in relation to linux? )
Linux Kernel Programming is something which involves kernel components, meaning - kernel data structures and headers. A program in which one uses the existing kernel features or enhances the current features is a kernel program, typically a kernel module. In a way even the Bash scripting can be called as Linux Kernel programming. The device driver in a broad term is nothing but a set of interrupt handlers. Having said that, a device driver is a kernel program in itself as it uses the Linux kernel capabilities which is ported on a device/hardware. So in short the relation between the two is Device driver development is a form of Linux Kernel Programming.
Basically you have two kinds of programs running on your computer : the kernel, which has access to the computer hardware, and "userland" programs which ask the kernel to do low-level stuff (allocate memory, send data to the network, ...).
To do this, the kernel must know how to interact with some given piece of hardware. This is what we call "device drivers". In Linux, the device drivers are implemented as kernel module and device driver programming is akin to kernel programming because you deal with low-level operations straight to the metal instead of higher-level operations that go through the kernel.
Bash scripting is programming a shell (Bash) to run userland programs that themselves use the kernel to do the actual work. Bash-scripting is userland programming.
Device driver development is a subset of Linux kernel programming.
Device driver development is writing or modifying kernel modules that will handle a device. A device driver is a special case of kernel modules.
Kernel modules are codes that work from within the kernel and do privileged tasks.
Kernel modules are an integral part of Linux kernel programming. That is how device driver development and Linux kernel programming are related. The former is a part of the latter.
Also, device drivers will ultimately be inserted into the kernel, and will work in a kernel context. That is, device drivers ultimately become a part of the kernel.
Hence driver development is a subset within Linux kernel programming.
While building Linux kernel from source, I noticed that it is also building some drivers (e.g. drivers/gpu/drm/i915 or nouveau etc).
On the other hand, on my system I also have xserver-xorg-video-intel package installed (Ubuntu). So the question is: how does the xserver-xorg-video-intel driver go with drivers/gpu/drm/i915 from kernel? Are they two separate things with different purpose (e.g. the second is for X11 only)?
Linux graphic stack is a wide and complex ecosystem.
you have a general overview here :
or a more complete and technical one from Stephane Marchesin which is one of the nouveau hackers.
Basically, graphics toolkits (Qt, Gtk, efl, etc..) talk with Xorg. XOrg use libdrm to interact with the kernel DRM infrastructure which stands upon and abstract video card drivers (nouveau, i915, ..).