Section 3 - Making the Most out of Your Hardware

This section will deal with Linux kernel memory management, advanced concepts in kernel interrupt management, and direct memory access. Then, in order to simplify memory access operations, we will use the memory access abstraction implemented in the Linux kernel, the regmap. At the end of this section, we will introduce the Linux device model to have a better understanding and overview of the device hierarchy on the system.

The following chapters will be covered in this section:

• Chapter 10, Understanding the Linux Kernel Memory Allocation
• Chapter 11, Implementing Direct Memory Access (DMA) Support
• Chapter 12, Abstracting Memory Access – Introduction to the Regmap API: a Register Map Abstraction
• Chapter 13, Demystifying the Kernel IRQ Framework
• Chapter 14, Introduction to the Linux Device Model