Thanks Bjørn! I will investigate this better and see if I can understand it better. I really appreciate the pointers! Henrique On Sat, Jan 30, 2016 at 2:41 PM, Bjørn Mork <bjorn@mork.no> wrote:
Henrique Montenegro <typoon@gmail.com> writes:
Hello list,
I am reading through the e1000 driver and trying to figure out how the probe function on it gets called.
The driver initialization function calls pci_register_driver:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------->8
static struct pci_driver e1000_driver = { .name = e1000_driver_name, .id_table = e1000_pci_tbl, .probe = e1000_probe, .remove = e1000_remove, // ... };
static int __init e1000_init_module(void) { // ... ret = pci_register_driver(&e1000_driver); // ... }
----------------------------------------------------------------------------->8
And pci_register_driver is defined as (on linux/pci.h):
----------------------------------------------------------------------------->8
#define pci_register_driver(driver) \ __pci_register_driver(driver, THIS_MODULE, KBUILD_MODNAME)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------->8
Function __pci_register_driver is defined as (drivers/pci/pci-driver.c):
----------------------------------------------------------------------------->8
int __pci_register_driver(struct pci_driver *drv, struct module *owner, const char *mod_name) { /* initialize common driver fields */ drv->driver.name = drv->name; drv->driver.bus = &pci_bus_type; drv->driver.owner = owner; drv->driver.mod_name = mod_name;
spin_lock_init(&drv->dynids.lock); INIT_LIST_HEAD(&drv->dynids.list);
/* register with core */ return driver_register(&drv->driver); } EXPORT_SYMBOL(__pci_register_driver);
----------------------------------------------------------------------------->8
This is the point where I am getting lost. I can't figure out how the
Kernel
will know about the functions defined in the e1000_driver struct mentioned before, since it does not seem to pass a reference to it anywhere.
How does the kernel know where the probe function for this module is in this case? To be honest, for any driver that calls pci_register_driver, how will the kernel know where the probe function is since it does not seem like it is being passed to driver_register?
The magic is in the 'drv->driver.bus = &pci_bus_type;' assigment. This is where the driver core will look for functions knowing how to handle this specific driver. See Documentation/driver-model/bus.txt etc
Look at the defintion of pci_bus_type in drivers/pci/pci-driver.c :
struct bus_type pci_bus_type = { .name = "pci", .match = pci_bus_match, .uevent = pci_uevent, .probe = pci_device_probe, .remove = pci_device_remove, .shutdown = pci_device_shutdown, .dev_groups = pci_dev_groups, .bus_groups = pci_bus_groups, .drv_groups = pci_drv_groups, .pm = PCI_PM_OPS_PTR, }; EXPORT_SYMBOL(pci_bus_type);
And then look at the different callbacks. These explain how the generic &drv->driver above is turned back into a pci_driver on probing:
static int pci_device_probe(struct device *dev) { int error; struct pci_dev *pci_dev = to_pci_dev(dev); struct pci_driver *drv = to_pci_driver(dev->driver);
to_pci_dev() and to_pci_driver() are just macros simplifying the usual container_of trick. From include/linux/pci.h :
#define to_pci_dev(n) container_of(n, struct pci_dev, dev) .. #define to_pci_driver(drv) container_of(drv, struct pci_driver, driver)
Hope this helps.
Bjørn