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You're reading from  Mastering Embedded Linux Programming - Third Edition

Product typeBook
Published inMay 2021
PublisherPackt
ISBN-139781789530384
Edition3rd Edition
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Authors (2):
Frank Vasquez
Frank Vasquez
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Frank Vasquez

Frank Vasquez is an independent software consultant specializing in consumer electronics. He has over a decade of experience designing and building embedded Linux systems. During that time, he has shipped numerous devices including a rackmount DSP audio server, a diver-held sonar camcorder, and a consumer IoT hotspot. Before his career as an embedded Linux engineer, Frank was a database kernel developer at IBM where he worked on DB2. He lives in Silicon Valley.
Read more about Frank Vasquez

Chris Simmonds
Chris Simmonds
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Chris Simmonds

Chris Simmonds is a software consultant and trainer living in southern England. He has almost two decades of experience in designing and building open-source embedded systems. He is the founder and chief consultant at 2net Ltd, which provides professional training and mentoring services in embedded Linux, Linux device drivers, and Android platform development. He has trained engineers at many of the biggest companies in the embedded world, including ARM, Qualcomm, Intel, Ericsson, and General Dynamics. He is a frequent presenter at open source and embedded conferences, including the Embedded Linux Conference and Embedded World.
Read more about Chris Simmonds

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Finding out about drivers at runtime

Once you have a running Linux system, it is useful to know which device drivers have been loaded and what state they are in. You can find out a lot by reading the files in
/proc and /sys.

First of all, you can list the character and block device drivers that are currently loaded and active by reading /proc/devices:

# cat /proc/devices
Character devices:
  1 mem 
  2 pty 
  3 ttyp 
  4 /dev/vc/0 
  4 tty 
  4 ttyS 
  5 /dev/tty 
  5 /dev/console 
  5 /dev/ptmx 
  7 vcs 
 10 misc 
 13 input 
 29 fb 
 81 video4linux 
 89 i2c 
 90 mtd
116 alsa
128 ptm
136 pts
153 spi
180 usb
189 usb_device
204 ttySC
204 ttyAMA
207 ttymxc
226 drm
239 ttyLP
240 ttyTHS
241 ttySiRF
242 ttyPS
243 ttyWMT
244 ttyAS
245 ttyO
246 ttyMSM
247 ttyAML
248 bsg
249 iio
250 watchdog
251 ptp
252 pps
253 media
254 rtc
Block devices:
259 blkext
  7 loop
  8 sd...
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Mastering Embedded Linux Programming - Third Edition
Published in: May 2021Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781789530384

Authors (2)

author image
Frank Vasquez

Frank Vasquez is an independent software consultant specializing in consumer electronics. He has over a decade of experience designing and building embedded Linux systems. During that time, he has shipped numerous devices including a rackmount DSP audio server, a diver-held sonar camcorder, and a consumer IoT hotspot. Before his career as an embedded Linux engineer, Frank was a database kernel developer at IBM where he worked on DB2. He lives in Silicon Valley.
Read more about Frank Vasquez

author image
Chris Simmonds

Chris Simmonds is a software consultant and trainer living in southern England. He has almost two decades of experience in designing and building open-source embedded systems. He is the founder and chief consultant at 2net Ltd, which provides professional training and mentoring services in embedded Linux, Linux device drivers, and Android platform development. He has trained engineers at many of the biggest companies in the embedded world, including ARM, Qualcomm, Intel, Ericsson, and General Dynamics. He is a frequent presenter at open source and embedded conferences, including the Embedded Linux Conference and Embedded World.
Read more about Chris Simmonds