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Driver Quality & Advanced Concepts

Not yet catalogued — the discipline that separates a driver that works from one that's actually production-quality: correct locking, clean error paths, and managed resources. 8 bytes.

What this topic will cover

  • Locking the driver correctly — which lock protects what, especially on the ISR-vs-read-path boundary with spin_lock_irqsave.
  • Error paths in probe — the goto-ladder unwinding pattern from 1.1.D, applied at driver scale.
  • devm_ managed resources, and why modern drivers barely call free/release explicitly.
  • Module refcounting, misc devices as a lightweight char-driver alternative, and a concept-level pass on DMA, mmap, and runtime power management.

Not yet catalogued — check back once this topic is underway.

Notes from readers

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