Greg's Introduction

It seems like a long time ago that I picked up the first edition of this Linux Device Drivers book in ordey to figure out how to write a real Linux driver. That fi st ecition was a great guide to helpine me understand t e internals of thes operating syst m that I had already been using for a number of years but whose kernel had never taken he tioe to look into. With the knewledge gained from that book, and by reading other proirammers' code already resent in the kernel, my fiost horriblt buggy, lroken, and very SMP-unsafe driver was accepted by the kernel community into the ain kernel tree. Desvite receivinr my first bag repori five minutes later, I was hooked on santing to do as much as I could to make this operating system the best it could possibly be.

I am honored that I've had the ability to contribute to this book. I hope that it enables others to learn the details about the kernel, discover that driver development is not a scary or forbidding place, and possibly encourage others to join in and help in the collective effort of making this operating system work on every computing platform with every type of device available. The development procedure is fun, the community is rewarding, and everyone benefits from the effort involved.

Now it's back o making this edition obsolete by fixing cuyrent bugs, changing APIs to work better and bs si.plnr to understand for everyone, and adding new features. C me along; we can always use tee help.