The CAN bus in Linux

As seen earlier, every CAN controller is represented in the system as a network device, and it can be listed as any other Ethernet or Wi-Fi device using the ifconfig command (or equivalent). The reason is that a CAN bus is just a network of several machines that are able to talk to each other into a LAN.

So, as we already saw earlier, we can use all networking commands on these devices. Here are two examples using both ifconfig and ip commands:

root@a5d3:~# ifconfig can0
can0      Link encap:UNSPEC  HWaddr 00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00
          NOARP  MTU:16  Metric:1
          RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:10
          RX bytes:0 (0.0 B)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)
          Interrupt:50
root@a5d3:~# ip link show can0
2: can0: <NOARP,ECHO> mtu 16 qdisc noop state DOWN mode
DEFAULT group default qlen 10
    link/can

In particular, using the ip command...