Writing UNIX Device Drivers

Rating:
Summary: More Information on "Writing UNIX Device Drivers"
Review: Although written over five years ago, "Writing UNIX Device Drivers" is still broadly applicable to most current UNIX systems and forms an excellent introduction to the device driver SDK manuals for your specific UNIX platform.

The book was written for UNIX System V Release 3.2 (with all drivers tested on SCO UNIX 3.2) but there is a chapter on the significant difference between drivers for 3.2 and 4.0.

The book is based on the one-day intensive device driver writing course I presented for many years at the Uniforum conferences and teaches all of the important concepts in the context of real working drivers.

The book takes the reader gently from a simple yet functional 25-line character-mode driver through to a full 600-line STREAMS tty driver. In the process of studying the 12 drivers included in the book, the reader is not only introduced the all major aspects of device drivers, but sees these techniques employed in real drivers.

The full source to each driver is included in the driver (no short excerpts with "the remaining parts are left to the reader as an exercise") and the source on diskette is available from the author.

In addition to covering the details of writing drivers, there is a classic chapter "Zen and the Art of Device Driver Writing" which passes along the accumulated gems of over a dozen years of device driver writing.

Most chapters also contain exercises that assist instructors is using this book as a course textbook.

In summary, if you know C but are new to UNIX device drivers, start with this book. Not only will you get as painless an introduction to the topic as in possible, you will be given the full source to a range of drivers that you can use as the basis for your own driver project.

Table of Contents
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1. What is a Device Driver?
2. Character Driver I: A Test Data Generator
3. Character Drivers II: An A/D Converter
4. Character Drivers III. A Line Printer Driver
5. Block Drivers I: A Test Data Generator
6. Block Drivers III: A Ram Disk Driver
7. Block Drivers III: A SCSI Disk Driver
8. Character Drivers IV: A Raw Disk Driver
9. Terminal Drivers I: The COM1 Port
10. Character Drivers V: A Tape Drive
11. STREAMS Drivers I: A Loop-Back Driver
12. STREAMS Drivers II: The COM1 Port (Revisited)
13. Driver Installation
14. Zen and the Art of Device Driver Writing
15. Writing Drivers for System V Release 4


Rating:
Summary: Complete Examples, and Much More
Review: If nothing else, the thoroughness of the example code makes this book worth the cost. The variety of exampe types (nic, ram-based fs, etc) make it all the better.

Rating:
Summary: One of the best book for learning UNIX drivers.
Review: This book is a priceless collection in the shelf of a Device Driver writer. Whether you are writing device drivers or just want to know more about them this is the book to read. The easy-to-understand language and style adopted by the author is also an added benefit to the reader.

Rating:
Summary: Plain English, thoughtful flow of topics
Review: What I'm appreciating about this book is the simplicity and the vigor of the writing. It's *really* easy to make this topic sound really complicated. Pajari's approach lays out as few issues at one time as possible, then adds gradually to the mix. The early parts are not taxing, but the pace does pick up.

In teaching the subject, I often find it difficult to slow students down, and get them to confine their questions to one problem domain at a time. Device drivers have to fit into the kernel subsystem and communicate with a device through interrupts; there are LOTS of side questions people can dream up.

This book gave me a few insights into containing the discussions and forestall all that anxiety. Well worth the wait to get the book.