Major and Minor Numbers 及 注册和撤销

转载[@more@]Char devices are accessed through names in the filesystem. Those names are called special files or device files or simply nodes of the filesystem tree; they are conventionally located in the /dev directory. Special files for char drivers are identified by a "c" in the first column of the output of ls -l . Block devices appear in /dev as well, but they are identified by a "b." The focus of this chapter is on char devices, but much of the following information applies to block devices as well. If you issue the ls -l command, you'll see two numbers (separated by a comma) in the device file entries before the date of the last modification, where the file length normally appears. These numbers are the major and minor device number for the particular device. The following listing shows a few devices as they appear on a typical system. Their major numbers are 1, 4, 7, and 10, while the minors are 1, 3, 5, 64, 65, and 129. crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 1, 3 Apr 11 2002 null crw------- 1 root root 10, 1 Apr 11 2002 psaux crw------- 1 root root 4, 1 Oct 28 03:04 tty1 crw-rw-rw- 1 root tty 4, 64 Apr 11 2002 ttys0 crw-rw---- 1 root uucp 4, 65 Apr 11 2002 ttyS1 crw--w---- 1 vcsa tty 7, 1 Apr 11 2002 vcs1 crw--w---- 1 vcsa tty 7, 129 Apr 11 2002 vcsa1 crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 1, 5 Apr 11 2002 zero Traditionally, the major number identifies the driver associated with the device. For example, /dev/null and /dev/zero are both managed by driver 1, whereas virtual consoles and serial terminals are managed by driver 4; similarly, both vcs1 and vcsa1 devices are managed by driver 7. Modern Linux kernels allow multiple drivers to share major numbers, but most devices that you will see are still organized on the one-major-one-driver principle . The minor number is used by the kernel to determine exactly which device is being referred to . Depending on how your driver is written (as we will see below), you can either get a direct pointer to your device from the kernel, or you can use the minor number yourself as an index into a local array of devices. Either way, the kernel itself knows almost nothing about minor numbers beyond the fact that they refer to devices implemented by your driver. 3.2.1. The Internal Representation of Device Numbers Within the kernel, the dev_t type (defined in ) is used to hold device numbers—both the major and minor parts. As of Version 2.6.0 of the kernel, dev_t is a 32-bit quantity with 12 bits set aside for the major number and 20 for the minor number. Your code should, of course, never make any assumptions about the internal organization of device numbers; it should, instead, make use of a set of macros found in . To obtain the major or minor parts of a dev_t , use: MAJOR (dev_t dev); MINOR (dev_t dev); If, instead, you have the major and minor numbers and need to turn them into a dev_t , use: MKDEV (int major, int minor); Note that the 2.6 kernel can accommodate a vast number of devices, while previous kernel versions were limited to 255 major and 255 minor numbers. One assumes that the wider range will be sufficient for quite some time, but the computing field is littered with erroneous assumptions of that nature. So you should expect that the format of dev_t could change again in the future; if you write your drivers carefully, however, these changes will not be a problem. 3.2.2. Allocating and Freeing Device Numbers One of the first things your driver will need to do when setting up a char device is to obtain one or more device numbers to work with. The necessary function for this task is register_chrdev_region , which is declared in : int register_chrdev_region (dev_t first, unsigned int count, char *name); Here, first is the beginning device number of the range you would like to allocate. The minor number portion of first is often 0 , but there is no requirement to that effect. count is the total number of contiguous device numbers you are requesting. Note that, if count is large, the range you request could spill over to the next major number; but everything will still work properly as long as the number range you request is available. Finally, name is the name of the device that should be associated with this number range; it will appear in /proc/devices and sysfs. As with most kernel functions, the return value from register_chrdev_region will be 0 if the allocation was successfully performed. In case of error, a negative error code will be returned, and you will not have access to the requested region. register_chrdev_region works well if you know ahead of time exactly which device numbers you want. Often, however, you will not know which major numbers your device will use; there is a constant effort within the Linux kernel development community to move over to the use of dynamicly-allocated device numbers. The kernel will happily allocate a major number for you on the fly, but you must request this allocation by using a different function: int alloc_chrdev_region (dev_t *dev, unsigned int firstminor, unsigned int count, char *name); 成功了后，就会在/proc/device文件中有该设备的设备号了 With this function, dev is an output-only parameter that will, on successful completion, hold the first number in your allocated range. firstminor should be the requested first minor number to use; it is usually 0 . The count and name parameters work like those given to request_chrdev_region . Regardless of how you allocate your device numbers, you should free them when they are no longer in use. Device numbers are freed with: void unregister_chrdev_region (dev_t first, unsigned int count); The usual place to call unregister_chrdev_region would be in your module's cleanup function . The above functions allocate device numbers for your driver's use, but they do not tell the kernel anything about what you will actually do with those numbers. Before a user-space program can access one of those device numbers, your driver needs to connect them to its internal functions that implement the device's operations. We will describe how this connection is accomplished shortly, but there are a couple of necessary digressions to take care of first. When a device file is accessed, the kernel uses the major number of the file to determine which driver should be used to handle the access. This means that the kernel doesn't really need to use or even know about the minor number. The driver itself is the only thing that cares about the minor number. It uses the minor number to distinguish between different pieces of hardware. Kernel就知道major设备号，通过这个major设备号来找到driver。由driver本身来根据minor设备号区分具体的硬件。

来自 “ ITPUB博客 ” ，链接：http://blog.itpub.net/66634/viewspace-1059652/，如需转载，请注明出处，否则将追究法律责任。

转载于:http://blog.itpub.net/66634/viewspace-1059652/