Device File Creation – Linux Device Driver Tutorial Part 5

Last Updated on: August 31st, 2023

This article is a continuation of the Series on Linux Device Driver and carries the discussion on character drivers and their implementation. The aim of this series is to provide easy and practical examples that anyone can understand. This is the Device File Creation for Character Drivers – Linux Device Driver Tutorial Part 5.

Prerequisites

To continue with this tutorial, you must set up Ubuntu, Raspberry Pi, or Beaglebone. If you haven’t set up anything yet, we suggest you set up the boards that you have using the tutorials given below.

• Setup Ubuntu and Raspberry Pi
• Setup Beaglebone

You can find a video explanation of this tutorial here. You can also find all the Linux device driver’s video playlists here.

Device File Creation for Character Drivers

In our last tutorial, we have seen how to assign a major and minor number. But if you see, it will create a major and minor number. However, I did not create any device files under /dev/ directory. The device file is important to communicate with the hardware. Let’s start our tutorial.

Device Files

The device file allows transparent communication between user-space applications and hardware.

They are not normal “files”, but look like files from the program’s point of view: you can read from them, write to them, mmap() onto them, and so forth. When you access such a device “file,” the kernel recognizes the I/O request and passes it to a device driver, which performs some operations, such as reading data from a serial port or sending data to hardware.

Device files (although inappropriately named, we will continue to use this term) provide a convenient way to access system resources without requiring the application programmer to know how the underlying device works. Under Linux, as with most Unix systems, device drivers themselves are part of the kernel.

All device files are stored in /dev directory. Use ls command to browse the directory:

ls -l /dev/

Each device on the system should have a corresponding entry in /dev. For example, /dev/ttyS0 corresponds to the first serial port, known as COM1 under MS-DOS; /dev/hda2 corresponds to the second partition on the first IDE drive. In fact, there should be entries in /dev for devices you do not have.

The device files are generally created during system installation and include every possible device driver. They don’t necessarily correspond to the actual hardware on your system. There are a number of pseudo-devices in /dev that don’t correspond to any actual peripheral.

For example, /dev/null acts as a byte sink; any write request to /dev/null will succeed, but the data are written will be ignored.

When using ls -l to list device files in /dev, you’ll see something like the following:

crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 0 Aug 15 10:40 tty0

brw-rw---- 1 root disk 1, 0 Aug 15 10:40 ram0

First of all, note that the first letter of the permissions field is denoted as driver type. Device files are denoted either by b, for block devices, or c, for character devices.

Also, note that the size field in the ls -l listing is replaced by two numbers, separated by a comma. The first value is the major device number and the second is the minor device number.

Creating Device File

We can create a device file in two ways.

1. Manually
2. Automatically

We will discuss these topics one by one.

Manually Creating Device File

We can create the device file manually by using mknod.

mknod -m <permissions> <name> <device type> <major> <minor> <name> – Your device file name that should have a full path (/dev/name) <device type> – Put c or b c – Character Device b – Block Device <major> – major number of your driver <minor> – minor number of your driver -m <permissions> – optional argument that sets the permission bits of the new device file to permissions

Example:

sudo mknod -m 666 /dev/etx_device c 246 0

If you don’t want to give permission, You can also use chmod to set the permissions for a device file after creation.

Advantages:

• Anyone can create the device file using this method.
• You can create the device file even before loading the driver.

Programming:

I took this program from the previous tutorial. I’m going to create a device file manually for this driver.

[Get the Source code from GitHub]

/***************************************************************************//**
*  \file       driver.c
*
*  \details    Simple linux driver (Manually Creating a Device file)
*
*  \author     EmbeTronicX
*
*  \Tested with Linux raspberrypi 5.10.27-v7l-embetronicx-custom+
*
*******************************************************************************/
#include<linux/kernel.h>
#include<linux/init.h>
#include<linux/module.h>
#include <linux/kdev_t.h>
#include <linux/fs.h>
 
dev_t dev = 0;

/*
** Module init function
*/
static int __init hello_world_init(void)
{
        /*Allocating Major number*/
        if((alloc_chrdev_region(&dev, 0, 1, "Embetronicx_Dev")) <0){
                pr_err("Cannot allocate major number for device\n");
                return -1;
        }
        pr_info("Kernel Module Inserted Successfully...\n");
        return 0;
}

/*
** Module exit function
*/
static void __exit hello_world_exit(void)
{
        unregister_chrdev_region(dev, 1);
        pr_info("Kernel Module Removed Successfully...\n");
}
 
module_init(hello_world_init);
module_exit(hello_world_exit);
 
MODULE_LICENSE("GPL");
MODULE_AUTHOR("EmbeTronicX <embetronicx@gmail.com>");
MODULE_DESCRIPTION("Simple linux driver (Manually Creating a Device file)");
MODULE_VERSION("1.1");

• Build the driver by using Makefile (sudo make)
• Load the driver using sudo insmod
• Check the device file using ls -l /dev/. By this time device file is not created for your driver.
• Create a device file using mknod and then check using ls -l /dev/.

linux@embetronicx-VirtualBox:/home/driver/driver$sudo mknod -m 666 /dev/etx_device c 246 0 

linux@embetronicx-VirtualBox::/home/driver/driver$ ls -l /dev/ | grep "etx_device" 

crw-rw-rw-  1  root root  246, 0  Aug 15  13:53  etx_device

• Now our device file has been created and registered with a major number and a minor number.
• Unload the driver using sudo rmmod

Automatically Creating Device File

The automatic creation of device files can be handled with udev. Udev is the device manager for the Linux kernel that creates/removes device nodes in the /dev directory dynamically. Just follow the below steps.

1. Include the header file linux/device.h and linux/kdev_t.h
2. Create the struct Class
3. Create Device with the class which is created by the above step

Create the class

This will create the struct class for our device driver. It will create a structure under/sys/class/.

struct class * class_create(struct module *owner, const char *name); owner – pointer to the module that is to “own” this struct class name – pointer to a string for the name of this class

This is used to create a struct class pointer that can then be used in calls to class_device_create. The return value can be checked using IS_ERR() macro.

Note, the pointer created here is to be destroyed when finished by making a call to class_destroy.

void class_destroy (struct class * cls);

Create Device

This function can be used by char device classes. A struct device will be created in sysfs, and registered to the specified class.

struct device *device_create(struct *class, struct device *parent, dev_t dev, void * drvdata, const char *fmt, ...); class – pointer to the struct class that this device should be registered to parent – pointer to the parent struct device of this new device, if any devt – the dev_t for the char device to be added drvdata – the data to be added to the device for callbacks fmt – string for the device’s name ... – variable arguments

A “dev” file will be created, showing the dev_t for the device, if the dev_t is not 0,0. If a pointer to a parent struct device is passed in, the newly created struct device will be a child of that device in sysfs.

The pointer to the struct device will be returned from the call. Any further sysfs files that might be required can be created using this pointer. The return value can be checked using IS_ERR() macro.

Note, that you can destroy the device using device_destroy().

void device_destroy (struct class * class, dev_t devt);

If you don’t understand please refer to the below program, Then you will get some idea.

Programming:

[Get the source code from GitHub]

/***************************************************************************//**
*  \file       driver.c
*
*  \details    Simple linux driver (Automatically Creating a Device file)
*
*  \author     EmbeTronicX
*
*  \Tested with Linux raspberrypi 5.10.27-v7l-embetronicx-custom+
*
*******************************************************************************/
#include <linux/kernel.h>
#include <linux/init.h>
#include <linux/module.h>
#include <linux/kdev_t.h>
#include <linux/fs.h>
#include <linux/err.h>
#include <linux/device.h>
 
dev_t dev = 0;
static struct class *dev_class;
 
/*
** Module init function
*/
static int __init hello_world_init(void)
{
        /*Allocating Major number*/
        if((alloc_chrdev_region(&dev, 0, 1, "etx_Dev")) <0){
                pr_err("Cannot allocate major number for device\n");
                return -1;
        }
        pr_info("Major = %d Minor = %d \n",MAJOR(dev), MINOR(dev));
 
        /*Creating struct class*/
        dev_class = class_create(THIS_MODULE,"etx_class");
        if(IS_ERR(dev_class)){
            pr_err("Cannot create the struct class for device\n");
            goto r_class;
        }
 
        /*Creating device*/
        if(IS_ERR(device_create(dev_class,NULL,dev,NULL,"etx_device"))){
            pr_err("Cannot create the Device\n");
            goto r_device;
        }
        pr_info("Kernel Module Inserted Successfully...\n");
        return 0;
 
r_device:
        class_destroy(dev_class);
r_class:
        unregister_chrdev_region(dev,1);
        return -1;
}
 
/*
** Module exit function
*/
static void __exit hello_world_exit(void)
{
        device_destroy(dev_class,dev);
        class_destroy(dev_class);
        unregister_chrdev_region(dev, 1);
        pr_info("Kernel Module Removed Successfully...\n");
}
 
module_init(hello_world_init);
module_exit(hello_world_exit);
 
MODULE_LICENSE("GPL");
MODULE_AUTHOR("EmbeTronicX <embetronicx@gmail.com>");
MODULE_DESCRIPTION("Simple linux driver (Automatically Creating a Device file)");
MODULE_VERSION("1.2");

• Build the driver by using Makefile (sudo make) or if you are using the Beaglebone board, then you can use sudo make ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=arm-linux-gnueabi-.
• Load the driver using sudo insmod
• Check the device file using ls -l /dev/ | grep "etx_device"

linux@embetronicx-VirtualBox:/home/driver/driver$ ls -l /dev/ | grep "etx_device" 

crw------- 1  root  root  246, 0  Aug 15  13:36  etx_device

• Unload the driver using sudo rmmod

Video Explanation

You can check the video explanation of this tutorial below.

In this tutorial, we have created the device file manually and automatically. So, using this device file we can communicate with the hardware.

In our next tutorial, we explained how to open, read, write, and close the device file.

Please find the other Linux device driver tutorials here.

You can also read the below tutorials.

Linux Device Driver Tutorials	C Programming Tutorials
FreeRTOS Tutorials	NuttX RTOS Tutorials
RTX RTOS Tutorials	Interrupts Basics
I2C Protocol – Part 1 (Basics)	I2C Protocol – Part 2 (Advanced Topics)
STM32 Tutorials	LPC2148 (ARM7) Tutorials
PIC16F877A Tutorials	8051 Tutorials
Unit Testing in C Tutorials	ESP32-IDF Tutorials
Raspberry Pi Tutorials	Embedded Interview Topics
Reset Sequence in ARM Cortex-M4	BLE Basics
VIC and NVIC in ARM	SPI – Serial Peripheral Interface Protocol
STM32F7 Bootloader Tutorials	Raspberry PI Pico Tutorials
STM32F103 Bootloader Tutorials	RT-Thread RTOS Tutorials
Zephyr RTOS Tutorials - STM32	Zephyr RTOS Tutorials - ESP32
AUTOSAR Tutorials	UDS Protocol Tutorials
Product Reviews	STM32 MikroC Bootloader Tutorial
VHDL Tutorials	Arduino Tutorials