Hello,

I am writing a driver for a "generic" PCI device, that is, not a network card, or serial card, or anything with a special interface. I just need to be able to open it and ioctl().

I want to know, once I initialize a PCI device that the driver supports, how to assign the name to that device, that will then be accessible to open() and ioctl() from user space.

To paraphrase justice Clarence Thomas, "I racked my brains on this" for 2 hours - I went over Rubini's latest edition chapter on PCI drivers and searched the web, and nowhere, could I find any information on this.

Please tell me. Mark Galeck

You'll need to assign your device a major and minor number and then create a corresponding device file for it. Use one of the major numbers reserved for development purposes (there's a list in Documentation/devices.txt in the kernel source. Also see ioctl-number.txt if you plan to define any new ioctls. As for the actual mechanics section 7.1 of the kernel module development guide has a pretty clear code sample for how to do it.

Wow thanks, this is a pretty good guide. These guys, should publish this as a book to replace Rubini. Rubini is OK and there is no other book out there, but this looks better.