The I²C bus in Linux

Each I²C device has a well-defined 7 bit address that the master must use in order to communicate with a device. This address is not assigned at runtime and, as for the USB devices, it's assigned by the board designer by setting chip's pins.

Tip

Typically, the chip manufacturer sets the most significant 3 or 4 bits, and the board designer can set the remaining bits in order to suit his/her needs.

Another thing to be outlined regarding the I²C bus is that for each message, the master must specify whether the message wants to read or write data from the slave. This special action is done by adding a final bit (the least significant bit) to the slave address, and the master uses 0 to write data and 1 to read data from the slave.

As for the USB bus, we still have two main actors: master and slave. So, in the kernel, we will find both the device driver types.

Regarding the I²C master device, there is nothing special to do here since the proper driver is already up and running...