Comments about oreilly Linux Device Drivers, 3rd Edition:

I love Oreilly books in general. But I feel this book does not delve enough into practical examples. I feel it is too much theory and worse it does not cover enough concepts in the kernel. For example, it does not cover how input devices work, how frame buffer drivers work, how audio drivers work etc.

I think "Essential Linux Device Drivers by Sreekrishnan Venkateswaran, Prentice Hall" is a much better book for kernel developers.

I hope the next version of this book takes giving practical examples seriously and also include input/audio/framebuffer/graphics drivers as well.

Comments about oreilly Linux Device Drivers, 3rd Edition:

the sample code of this book is not very practical.
Lack of serial port driver sample. only has a very poor tty driver sample.

Comments about oreilly Linux Device Drivers, 3rd Edition:

It used to be that the Linux kernel kept major changes for major number revisions (2.4, 2.6 etc). No longer. Texts like this have no hope at all keeping up. It was a great text however for the early 2.6 kernels, and I mourn it's passage into obsolescence. I dearly wish it could be updated quarterly.

Comments about oreilly Linux Device Drivers, 3rd Edition:

Disk and storage stack is not dealt with. It is better to draw a picture of the kernel subsystems, logical and physical drivers first...

Comments about oreilly Linux Device Drivers, 3rd Edition:

Introduction

I picked this book up as an experience embedded software engineer who wanted to explore and learn about Linux device drivers. With a background in real-time embedded software development(with some RTOS experience) and years of Linux/nix user/developer experience this book nicely matched my learning path.

Layout of the book:

The chapters are layed out in a logical and incremental fashion where introductory chapters stick to the big picture stuff while later on chapters delve deep in to the internals.

Contents and Examples:

Book takes the approach of explaining the subjects in concise manner with examples and interesting incite. However the code examples in many cases are incomplete, and duly so. I say this because the lot of examples, in their entirety, are provided on their web/ftp site.

Currentness and compatibility:

The book uses x86 as its platform and for its examples. I found some minor differences in API interfaces on other platforms(ppc). Also some of the latest kernels have altered some of the APIs slightly.

For who:

In my opinion this book is for software engineers/developers who has experience in C and Makefiles. Any embedded development experience will help understand why things are done the way they are and the deeper issues of concurrency and timing.

Conclusion:

This book is the benchmark for Linux device driver books. It is well set out and a easy read. To get the maximum out of the book you will need to play around with the examples/ideas that are covered in this book.

Comments about oreilly Linux Device Drivers, 3rd Edition:

I was hoping to use the information in this book to

help me write a driver to map some memory on a PCI

Express card to user space. While the book has lots

of partial examples that discuss how this could be

done, there is no complete example of a driver that

does this. I found this more than a little disappointing since it appears that there is a relatively complex sequence of events needed to pull this off.

Comments about oreilly Linux Device Drivers, 3rd Edition:

My english is not good, so I will buy spanish version of the book. The book is good but the spanish translation is very, very ,very bad. I hope more for a 44 book.

Thanks.

Comments about oreilly Linux Device Drivers, 3rd Edition:

This book has negative and positive sides:

Negative: the 3rd editions contains many wrong references to non-existing paragraphs etc. Very annoying if you want to follow the discussions. Many code snippets are unnecessary complicated which makes the general line of thought sometimes difficult to follow. For people with low knowledge of the kernel this will be a stopper. All listings are incomplete, but the online examples are no help either: it's an unordered set of files, sometimes not working or at least too little explanatory text.

There are not many alternative texts on this subject with all these details, so the book is a must-have for anybody who starts to write kernel modules. A very good outline of kernel characteristics wrt writing modules etc. Read it without a bottom-up approach in mind - you will need a lot more information, but this can be easily found on internet.

It was nice to see that many of the 2.4 kernel issues have been refreshed for 2.6.

Comments about oreilly Linux Device Drivers, 3rd Edition:

I bought this book, after having very good experiences with the first two editions and now I'm a bit disappointed.

The main reason for buying was the "Backwards compatibility" section of each chapter, which contained some very nice hints and suggestions in the last two editions.

Although being a nice book for kernel 2.6 only development, this book is not the book I wanted to buy, since I do still have to compare between several sources in order to get the information I need.

Comments about oreilly Linux Device Drivers, 3rd Edition:

As a professional developer with Linux drivers deployed in the field, I can honestly say there is no way I could do it without this book; or at least not without a lot of headache, guesswork, uncertainty, inefficiency, and more time than any manager is willing to allot for a project! From the 1st edition to the 3rd, "Linux Device Drivers" is the bible of Linux device driver development.

My only criticism of the book (all editions) is Chapter 2, which describes the build process. This is the chapter that always leaves the most questions unanswered. For the 3rd edition in particular, the content is certainly sufficient for small-scale projects and hobbyists, but it is not sufficient for production environments with large development trees. For anything significant, be prepared to resort to trial and error.

On the other hand, I'd hate to try to build even the simplest driver without the information that is presented in Chapter 2!

Not only is this book a "must-read" for any Linux driver developer, but it is also an indispensible desk resource that will be referred to often... and frequently borrowed by colleagues throughout the office! This book isn't a dust collector.