On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 2:28 AM, Tapas Mishra <mightydreams@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Hi, > I read the 17th Chapter of LDD3 and explored what is a network device driver. > I wanted to understand in real context the working of network device > driver on my laptop. > The book described about snull (dummy ) device. > > So here is the problem > when I do an ifconfig the open,close, and other methods which the > driver has defined come into action. > I did strace ifconfig to understand what system calls were issued when > I do an ifconfig from userspace > here is the output of strace > http://pastebin.com/FMggtA9s > what I see is most of the calls are > open,access,fstat,mmap,mprotect,close,ioctl,write, > what I am not clear is > what mechanism is existing which says that when ifconfig is issued > then the response will come from > a particular set of driver (I understand that we register the driver > by register_netdev but how does the > system calls or requests from ifconfig transferred to the particular > device or how does > ifconfig communicates with kernel and I see the resultant commands > issued via strace as you see in above pastebin output. drivers/net/e100.c is a standard Ethernet pci driver to look at. Basically, there is are function pointers to all those functions in the struct net_device or net_device_ops depending on how old your kernel is. Net_device_ops is the newer of the two. The driver registers with the pci subsystem and the pci subsystem determines which driver to use and therefore which net_device/net_device_ops struct to call for those functions. -- John -- To unsubscribe from this list: send an email with "unsubscribe kernelnewbies" to ecartis@xxxxxxxxxxxx Please read the FAQ at http://kernelnewbies.org/FAQ
