Linux - User Space Device Drivers

The device drivers for Linux are best written in the Kernel Space to take advantage of the Kernel API's that are not available to the User space. However, there are reasons to write device drivers in user space. The advantage being you don't have to recompile and deploy the kernel for every change and possibility of having different licensing options etc.

The Linux Kernel offers some basic infrastructure to write a device driver in the User Space. The common basic requirement to write an device driver is the access to Interrupts, GPIO and some form of communication Bus (SPI / I2C).

In the subsequent posts we will see how to access each of hardware resource from the User Space.