I want to learn writing device drivers for linux...
Plzz advice me what to study...
Actually i have gone through following books already-->
1. Writing UNIX device Drivers by George Pajari
2. Linux Device Drivers by Alessandro et.al.
ny other reference material i can get plzz tell me
Do i also need to study the Linux Kernel?
Moreover which platform will be the best to use?
Another question Is it possible to make A Universal Device Driver I mean u need not have to write a diff device driver for diff Chipset features...(I m not talking about generic drivers)

bye

The Linux Device Drivers book you spoke of above is full of good examples on writing device drivers.

As far as "platform" is concerned... writting a Linux driver in anything other then C compiled by anything other then GCC is going to be a loosing battle. There are some people doing C++ runtime support for the linux kernel but it is terribly buggy and requires heavily patched kernels.

As far as studying the kernel.. it is a bit helpful to know a little about how the kernel works. There is no glibc availble in kernel space. The provided libraries in the kernel are much less extensive then that of userspace. I find it helpful to keep the Understand the Linux Kernel book around in case I need to look something up.

"Use the Source, Luke!"

On a computer that you don't mind if you crash and have down for several days... on a computer with nothing else of interest thereupon ... dive-in and Just Do It. Take one of the examples from any of the books that you mentioned, and Just Build One. Actually hit that insmod command and watch the sparks fly!

It's like swimming: you can sit on the edge of the pool and read all of the books you want ... and drown. To learn how to swim, you have to get in the water.

To remind you Linus Travolds said on August 1991 "When men were men and used to write their own device drivers."
The above reply is not an encouraging one...Though I'm a newbie to LQ but its not the case with my programming skills...
I don't know wat has been your experience with drivers but I hv tried my hands successfully in few of the drivers given in the above metioned books...I'm quite familiar with the dangers of system getting crashed and have faced a few times while testing drivers using [i]insmod[i/] but those were smaller modules that too in UNIX environment ...n only because of the problems I wanted the advice on writing Linux Drivers...
You can't swim just by throwing yourself in water you need someone to teach you...
So don't think that I have just gone through these books like Novels n m not trying anything....
Also i have written drivers on C platform but i have heard that they can be written in Perl too and its more easy there...that's why i had put up this question ....Is it true...plzz tell me
Bye