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I am trying to write a network device driver for Linux. The device that I have has an API available that allows me to access all of the features I need through a shared object that exists in userspace.

I want to write a network driver such that I can make the device show up as a CAN interface. However, in order to interact with the device I need to use a specific shared object that exists in userspace.

The reason that I need a network device driver is to expose a CAN Interface that can be interacted with via the SocketCAN utilities.

Is there a way that I can write a network device driver in userspace? Or what would the best way for me to architect a solution?

Tl;Dr

Need to write a device driver for a device which can only be interacted with from userspace via a supplied shared object which exposes the API. I need the device to show up as a network interface in order to utilize the SocketCAN utilities and other applications that communicate with CAN interfaces in Linux.

What are my options here? What can I do?

Thanks!

Thomas
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  • First of all, thank you so much for the information and input. I was afraid I would be bottled for asking such a question. From what I understand there is not a way to create a CAN network device from userspace. It is essentially the same as any other net_device element in the kernel with some flags altered to become CAN device. What I need to do is create a net_device similar to one that you would see for an ethernet card, or usb-ethernet adapter, the issue is that instead of writing to hardware registers via PCI or USB my only means of communications with the device are through this SO file – Thomas Oct 18 '15 at 12:29
  • Moved my comments to the answer, adding some stuff to what I said. – Sam Protsenko Oct 18 '15 at 21:17

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So you are saying that there is no driver for your network device in kernel at all, and it can be only accessed via some user-space library? In that case shared library you mentioned should be communicating with your network device by memory mapping your /dev/mem file, in order to be able to read/write to hardware registers. Or perhaps by using some UIO.

So your driver should be also developed in user-space then... Then the actual question you should ask is how to use kernel CAN API from user-space? And is it possible at all in the first place? For answers I guess you should look at Documentation/networking/can.txt. And if the answer is "no" (means you can't expose CAN interface from user-space), then you should develop also some kernel driver which would interact with your user-space part, exposing CAN interface.

In ideal world the whole driver architecture would look like this:

Ideal driver architecture

But you need to use some (proprietary, if I understand correctly) shared library API to interact with your device. So I propose you to use next driver architecture, which depicted on the image below:

  • blue color stands for parts that need to be developed
  • magenta is for already existing code

Proposed driver architecture

In a nutshell, your app and driver both make a shim between SocketCAN API and shared library API.

So you need to develop 2 components:

  1. Driver (on kernel side). It's in charge of:
    • talking to SocketCAN utilities
    • talking to your user-space application
  2. Application (in user-space); it's probably should be a daemon, as it's gonna be running constantly. It's in charge of:
    • talking to shared library
    • talking to your driver

The last question remains is which kernel API to use to interact between your kernel space driver and user-space application (marked as IPC on picture). It strictly depends on which kind of data you are going to send between two, and how much of data you will want to send, and which way of sending is most appropriate for your task. It may also depend on your shared library API: you probably don't want to spend much of CPU time to convert messages format (as you already have triple context switching with this driver architecture, which is not really nice for performance). So it's probably should be something packet-oriented, like Netlink.

Next reading can be useful to figure out which IPC to use:

Sam Protsenko
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  • This is exactly what I had in mind but you laid it out in such a great way. I am new to writing kernel code and I wanted to make sure that my approach was the correct one, thank you so much for this answer! – Thomas Oct 19 '15 at 02:40