When developing inside the kernel, we may need to do some miscellaneous activities to implement our device drivers, such as dynamically allocating memory and using specific data types in order to store register data, or simply actively waiting some time in order to be sure that a peripheral has completed its reset procedure.
To perform all these tasks, Linux offers to kernel developers a rich set of useful functions, macros, and data types that we'll try to present in this chapter through the means of very simple example codes, because we wish to point out to the reader how he/she can use them to simplify device driver development. That's why, in this chapter, we will cover the following recipes:
- Using kernel data types
- Managing helper functions
- Dynamic memory allocation
- Managing kernel linked lists
- Using kernel hash tables
- Getting access...
