Design and Implementation of Character Device Driver for Customized Kernel of ARM based Platform

Nowadays, embedded linux is widely used operating system due to its compatibility with variety of systems like super computer, work station, personal computer, system on chip (SoC), server and custom computer. The major reason of using linux is high portability and open source code. Also, it supports different type of architectures like- x86, PowerPC, MIPS, H8, SPARC, or ARM and many more. This paper deals with design, implementation and testing of character device driver for the GPIO pins of ARM Cortex based platform. Device driver is a piece of code written in C language which is responsible for controlling the hardware and part of the kernel. ARM based platform Raspberry Pi is used in this work, supports the Linux OS. Due to missing of dependencies and patches, the option of cross compilation is available such as tool chain which contains GCC compiler, assembler, linker and debugger etc.