Kernel Development Learning Pipeline

A6 - Implement a spec 🫠

You will practice developing a character driver and writing specifications and testing code for it.

You will follow the steps taken in class to develop a specification, tests, and a character driver, and your driver will behave similarly to what was shown in class, but with a small twist: your character driver should reverse the string between when it receives it and when the user asks for it back. The lseek and ioctl operations should work identically.

Outcomes:

• Get familiar with how a character driver spec is formatted and how thorough the tests need to be.
• Get comfortable following a spec in the context of writing a character driver.
• Get comfortable with writing simple character drivers.

Procedure:

• Make a new new directory named firstname_lastname/ within the A6 folder and write your specification in a markdown file.
• Write a test program and a makefile that compiles it. You can load our dummy character driver that just logs operations while writing your test program so that you have a file you can interact with (obviously though it won’t pass the tests).
• Create a character driver adhering to the spec and passing your test program, add support for compiling it to the makefile.

What to submit:

• The first patch should create your directory with the spec inside.
• The second patch should add the test program and Makefile.
• The third patch should add the character driver and modify the Makefile so it can be compiled.
• Don’t forget a cover letter.