Linux Driver Project

[Javier Martinez Canillas]

On Thu, Apr 26, 2012 at 8:59 AM, Rabee Al-Maqabi
<rabee.almaqabi at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Wed, Apr 25, 2012 at 8:26 PM, Javier Martinez Canillas
> <martinez.javier at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Apr 25, 2012 at 11:19 AM, Rabee Al-Maqabi
>> <rabee.almaqabi at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Hi,
>> >
>> > I am looking for not yet supported piece of hardware to write a driver
>> > for
>> > it. anyone can help?
>> >
>> > Regards,
>> > Rabee Al-Maqabi
>>
>> Hi Rabee,
>>
>> Linux Device Drivers 3rd edition (LDD3) is a great book to learn how
>> to write Linux device drivers. The best thing about this book is that
>> teaches how to write device drivers for memory-based virtual devices,
>> which mean that you don't need any special hardware to run the example
>> drivers on your computer.
>>
>> Fortunately the Linux internal API is not stable and that allows us to
>> improve the kernel every day. But this has the side effect that any
>> documentation about the Linux kernel quickly becomes obsolete.
>>
>> A long time ago I updated the LDD3 examples so they could be compiled
>> and used on newer kernels, this was for academic purposes so my
>> students would be able to use that code.
>>
>> Sadly I haven't had any time to update to more recent kernels so if
>> you want to work on Linux device drivers you can fork my tree [1] and
>> make the drivers work on recent kernels, I know that many people would
>> be happy (specially students).
>>
>> [1]: https://github.com/martinezjavier/ldd3
>>
>> Best regards,
>>
>> --
>> Javier Martínez Canillas
>> (+34) 682 39 81 69
>> Barcelona, Spain
>
>
> Hi Javier,
>
> Thank you for your reply. Linux Device Drivers is indeed a great book. I
> have read it in addition to Understanding the Linux Kernel and I have
> experimented with my Linux box. At this point, I would like to have a
> real-world experience and write a driver for a piece of hardware not yet
> supported.
>
> Best regards,
>
> --
> Rabee Al-Maqabi

Ok, in that case you can buy an IGEPv2 board
(http://www.isee.biz/products/processor-boards/igepv2-board) from
Spaniard company ISEE.

ISEE manufactures very powerful System-on-Chip ARM OMAP3 based boards.

They don't use the mainline kernel but instead have their own forked
v2.3.37 kernel and their own first stage bootloader (igep-x-loader).
ISEE code can be found here: http://git.isee.biz/

So a great project could be give complete support to this board on the
mainline kernel. IGEPv2 is one of the boards that Linaro uses as a
reference for OMAP3 to test their kernels and rootfs images.

I own one of these boards an in my free time I hack both the kernel
and the U-boot bootloader to properly support the IGEPv2, but  there
is a lot of work to do and I found everytime more hard to find free
time to work on this.

So if you want to join me on this project it would be great :-)

Best regards,

-- 
Javier Martínez Canillas
(+34) 682 39 81 69
Barcelona, Spain