concept of SPI device driver inside kernel

georgewhr · 10-25-2013, 08:10 PM

Hi. I just started to learn SPI device driver. Inside /kernel/driver/spi, I found there is spi.c, spidev.c and spi-xxxx.c(for particular vendor chipset). Can anybody give me any details or mechanism about how thoes three modules work inside kernel? For my understand, spi.c is just a function module inside kernel, spidev.c is like a generic spi driver, spi-xxx.c is for particular vendor chip. But I don't know what's the relationship of them.

Ztcoracat · 11-19-2013, 11:42 PM

Hi:

Linux kernels are modular: a lot of the functionality is contained in modules that are loaded into the kernel dynamically. This keeps the core of the kernel small and makes it possible to load or replace modules in a running kernel without rebooting.

If you want to find out what modules are currently loaded into the kernel, use lsmod.

You can manually load and unload modules using modeprobe.

http://www.tldp.org/LDP/lkmpg/2.6/lkmpg.pdf
http://www.tuxradar.com/content/how-linux-kernel-works