On Wed, Jan 25, 2006 at 10:26:55PM -0700, Joe Knapka wrote: > Greg KH wrote: > > >On Wed, Jan 25, 2006 at 03:36:02PM -0800, Arun Srinivasan wrote: > > > > > >>I am new to device drivers. I have had a glance at Linux device drivers > >>book, but it talks about writing drivers only. What I need is what are the > >>issues I need to look into apart from just testing to see if the driver > >>works. How do I go about finding bugs? > >> > >> > > > >Why do you need to do this? If everything works just fine for you, then > >what bugs are there for you to find? :) > > > > > I haven't written a device driver (every time I decide to try it, turns out > someone else has already written the darn thing!), but it seems to me > there's lots of things that could go wrong in kernel space, even if > the device works. Oh there's loads of ways it can go wrong, and I think I've done all of them in the past :) > - Memory leaks. > - Corrupting kernel memory, thereby causing random failures elsewhere. > - Improper use of hardware APIs, thus interfering with the operation of > other devices on the same hardware bus. This is pretty rare with the way the kernel bus subsystems work today, thankfully. > - Lock snafus. All of these others can be helped by posting the code for review. thanks, greg k-h -- Kernelnewbies: Help each other learn about the Linux kernel. Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/kernelnewbies/ FAQ: http://kernelnewbies.org/faq/
