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Old 11-30-2011, 12:17 AM   #1
haribabu1836
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How the Linux device driver can inform the applications when some events occurs


Hi all,

I have a question like is there any way in Linux such that device driver can inform to the applications when ever driver wants?
I have a device which will receive many interrupts and i need to inform application when ever interrupts received.

Thanks in advance.
 
Old 12-01-2011, 10:18 AM   #2
RudyMartin
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is the application a program made by yourself? whats the name of the device in question?
 
Old 12-05-2011, 05:22 AM   #3
haribabu1836
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Quote:
Originally Posted by RudyMartin View Post
is the application a program made by yourself? whats the name of the device in question?
Thanks Martin.
Yes, I written a sample program which communicates to the driver through IOCTL's. My physical device is a FPGA.
 
Old 12-05-2011, 06:32 AM   #4
Nominal Animal
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Your driver could provide a character device, which provides a stream of event descriptors, one for each event. Personally, I'd use a binary structure similar to various interchange formats, i.e. something like
Code:
struct event {
    uint32_t  identifier;
    uint32_t  length;
    /* Optional data, if length > 0 */
};
If none of your interrupts have any associated data, and you know you'll need much less than 257 of them ever, then you could just make it a byte stream. An extensible event structure lets you extend the events without confusing existing clients.

When a client application is interested in those interrupts, it opens the device, and starts reading. Using the standard file semantics, O_NONBLOCK flag indicates that a reader wants to receive EWOULDBLOCK/EAGAIN when there is no data; without the flag the reader is blocked. O_ASYNC flag semantics are also useful to implement: whenever an event occurs, the reader is sent a signal (SIGIO by default, settable to eg. a realtime signal using fcntl()).

Note that my viewpoint here is from the userspace application; what is best for userspace applications and userspace programmers, not what is easiest to implement in a kernel module. Still, all of this is described in various tutorials, and is bog-standard stuff anyway; used by practically all sane char device drivers you'll ever see in Linux.

For example, see Linux Device Drivers, 3rd edition. Chapter 3 describes the basics of a char driver, Chapter 6 describes how to block and make the userspace application sleep (O_NONBLOCK) or signal asynchronous readers (O_ASYNC). Signal details are explained near the end of chapter 5.
 
  


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