Hi folks,
seems like I'm facing the job of having to write a Character device
driver, mainly with mmap interface, for a PCI Radar Converter card just
in development here.
There will be mainly 1 or 2 address ranges to mmap plus an optional DMA
engine to perform larger transfers, thus a small range of mmapped IO
registers for CSR purposes plus hopefully an IRQ.
My questions are:
- Is there a cookbook on how to write device drivers,
and is there support to automatically integrate them
into the kernel build process? (eg. like in DEC Unix)
- Who would assign me a major number for the new kind of
device, so that it won't collide with future Linux
major numbers?
- Would the world want me to stay in a special directory
with the new stuff? Or is it ok to take drivers/char/ ?
- I see big similarity to framebuffer drivers ( it has indeed to do
with data targeted 1:1 for the screen after processing) and will
probably learn from these. Btw. has someone tried to use the DMA
engine on a graphics card (copy rect) to pull data from one PCI
card to it's own video RAM? Maybe even color keyed?
- I was told Xfree 4.x should support color keyed copying.
This would be the main job of the applications using the new driver
and could save lots of CPU load if there is an X11 interface to
invoke it. Doe anyone know about such X11 functionality, which is
already built into normal graphics hardware for years indeed?
Thanks for your answers already. Folks from the
linux-kernel@vger.rutgers.edu list might answer to me directly or to one
of the other 2 lists, because I only am subscribed to those.
Is anyone of the hackers perhaps just looking for a job in Bremen,
germany? I feel a bit alone here as a Linux dude among many Windoof
developers. We must reach world domination!
Ciao,
-- Bernd Harriesbha@gmx.de http://www.freeyellow.com/members/bharries bha@nikocity.de Tel. +49 421 809 7343 priv. | MSB First! harries@stn-atlas.de +49 421 457 3966 offi. | Linux-m68k bernd@linux-m68k.org | Medusa T40
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