Device node - How does kernel know about it

[Jon Smirl]

On 12/27/07, Siva Prasad <sprasad at bivio.net> wrote:
> Thank you Jon and Nicholas.
>
> I already have "console=ttyS0" in the kernel command line. That is not
> helping me.

Do you have
CONFIG_EARLY_PRINTK=y
in .config?


>
> I looked at the major/minor numbers with a good working system and it
> looks correct for the nodes created in ramdisk.
>
> What is the kernel routine that is first called when there is, for
> example a read() function call from user program?
> I would like to start debugging from there and see if any thing at all
> happens when there is a call. Appreciate your help with this question.
>
> Thanks
> Siva
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Nicholas Mc Guire [mailto:der.herr at hofr.at]
> Sent: Friday, December 28, 2007 12:39 AM
> To: Siva Prasad
> Cc: linuxppc-dev at ozlabs.org; linuxppc-embedded at ozlabs.org
> Subject: Re: Device node - How does kernel know about it
>
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> > * Ramdisk is also executing fine, just that prints are not coming out
> of
> > serial. I can see the execution of various user programs with a printk
> > in sys_execve() routine. Ramdisk has all the required files like
> > /dev/console, /dev/ttyS0, etc.
> > * Looking further into tty driver, I noticed that call to tty_write()
> or
> > do_tty_write() is not happening at all. So, somewhere the interface
> > between kernel and user program is lost.
> > * Just to check it out, I tried to write a small kernel module and a
> > test program.
> >  - Attached memtest.c module (not really testing memory there. :-))
> >  - Attached testmemtest.c user program, that just open's it and reads
> > the information
> >  - Created a device node using "mknod /dev/memtest c 168 0"
> >  - When I do "insmod memtest.ko" inside the ramdisk bootup scripts, I
> > could see all the printk's on the console
> >  - When I execute "testmemtest" next in the same script, it does not
> > display the printk inside of memtest.c module. This only indicates
> that
> > read call did not really go to the kernel side.
> >  - Just to check my program's validity, I checked on a similar machine
> > and all the code works fine.
> >  - "uname -r" also matches with what I built. So, chances of exiting
> > from open call because of mismatch is remote. Since userland cannot
> > print, I have no idea what exactly is happening there.
> >
> The kernel will simply look at the major:minor numbers - so maybe you
> simply have a wrong major/minor for /dev/ttyS0 ? in that case you will
> see nothing but other than that most things will go on working.
>
> hofrat
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-- 
Jon Smirl
jonsmirl at gmail.com