Re: How to notify a user process from within a driver

[Richard B. Johnson]

On Thu, 1 May 2003, Lee, Shuyu wrote:

> Hello, All.
>
> I am working on a device driver. One of the features of the hardware is
> multi-channel I/O control. In order for a user process to communicate with
> the hardware, my design is for the user process to call the driver's ioctl
> to register a semaphore for each I/O channel, then wait on them. When the
> hardware detects an input, the ISR then BH will wake up the user process.
> This sounds straightforward in principle. Because there are two types of
> semaphores in Linux (one for kernel, and one for user), I am not sure how
> this can be accomplished. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
>
> My development environment is:
> 1) OS:  RedHat 7.2 (Linux 2.4.7),
> 2) gcc: 3.2.1,
> 3) PC:  one P-III (HP kayak) with 128Mbyte of memory,
> 4) Bus: PCI.
>
> Shuyu
>

You normally use poll() or select() for this. It's called poll()
inside the driver.

The user-mode code sleeps in poll() or select(). When your
driver ISR wants to wake up the process, it calls
wake_up_interruptible() from within the ISR.

Cheers,
Dick Johnson
Penguin : Linux version 2.4.20 on an i686 machine (797.90 BogoMips).
Why is the government concerned about the lunatic fringe? Think about it.