Introduction Still in 2020, it seems like Microsoft lives up to its reputation: Being arrogant, thinking that anyone in business must be a huge corporate, and in particular ending up completely ridiculous. Microsoft’s mail servers, which accept on behalf of Hotmail, MSN, Office 365, Outlook.com, or Live.com users are no exception. This also affects companies [...]
Introduction I ran into ftrace completely by chance, while trying to figure out why the call to usb_submit_urb() took so long time. In fact, it wasn’t. It was pr_info() that delayed the output. And it was ftrace that got me to realize that. Whether you’re into dissecting existing kernel code, and want to know which [...]
Introduction Most device drivers hook onto an already existing subsystem: Audio, networking, I2C, whatever. If it’s a specialized piece of hardware, a single device file is typically enough, and you get away with a misc device or, as shown in the kernel’s USB example (drivers/usb/usb-skeleton.c), with the USB framework’s usb_register_dev() call. However in some cases, [...]
Introduction Writing a device driver for Linux (or other kernel programming) always requires keeping parallel execution in mind. It’s often enough to follow common programming patterns, using spinlocks and mutexes in the same way that everyone else does. But somehow, I always find myself looking at my own code, and ask myself: Am I absolutely [...]