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You're reading from  Linux Device Driver Development Cookbook

Product typeBook
Published inMay 2019
Reading LevelIntermediate
PublisherPackt
ISBN-139781838558802
Edition1st Edition
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Rodolfo Giometti
Rodolfo Giometti
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Rodolfo Giometti

Rodolfo Giometti is an engineer, IT specialist, GNU/Linux expert and software libre evangelist. He is the author of the books BeagleBone Essentials, BeagleBone Home Automation Blueprints and GNU/Linux Rapid Embedded Programming by Packt Publishing and maintainer of the LinuxPPS projects. He still actively contributes to the Linux source code with several patches and new device drivers for industrial applications devices. During his 20+ years of experience, he has worked on the x86, ARM, MIPS, and PowerPC-based platforms. Now, he is the co-chief at HCE Engineering S.r.l., where he designs new hardware and software systems for the quick prototyping in industry environment, control automation, and remote monitoring.
Read more about Rodolfo Giometti

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Accessing I/O memory with mmap()

In the Getting access to I/O memory recipe in Chapter 6, Miscellaneous Kernel Internals, we saw how the MMU works and how we can get access to a memory-mapped peripheral. Within the kernel space, we must instruct the MMU in order to correctly translate a virtual address into a proper one, which must point to a well-defined physical address to which our peripheral belongs, otherwise, we can't control it!

On the other hand, in that section, we also used a userspace tool named devmem2, which can be used to get access to a physical address from the user space, using the mmap() system call. This system call is really interesting, because it allows us to do a lot of useful things, so let's start by taking a look at its man page (man 2 mmap):

NAME
mmap, munmap - map or unmap files or devices into memory

SYNOPSIS
#include <sys/mman.h>...
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Linux Device Driver Development Cookbook
Published in: May 2019Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781838558802

Author (1)

author image
Rodolfo Giometti

Rodolfo Giometti is an engineer, IT specialist, GNU/Linux expert and software libre evangelist. He is the author of the books BeagleBone Essentials, BeagleBone Home Automation Blueprints and GNU/Linux Rapid Embedded Programming by Packt Publishing and maintainer of the LinuxPPS projects. He still actively contributes to the Linux source code with several patches and new device drivers for industrial applications devices. During his 20+ years of experience, he has worked on the x86, ARM, MIPS, and PowerPC-based platforms. Now, he is the co-chief at HCE Engineering S.r.l., where he designs new hardware and software systems for the quick prototyping in industry environment, control automation, and remote monitoring.
Read more about Rodolfo Giometti