Having finished off SCSI drivers, I've turned my attention to character devices. There's a lot of console stuff here, but I thought I'd start with the not-terminal devices first, and work my way up to that level of tediousness.
Starting with the Makefile, I chose to read through the short and optionally-compiled mouse driver files - atixlmouse, busmouse, msbusmouse, psaux and mouse. There's a standard pattern to the bus mice, they're easy to read and it's a good start. By the time we get to psaux, it's not clear to me what's going on with psaux vs. 82c710, but I don't really care.
Then I read lp, mem, serial and tpqic02. mem is in some ways the most fun. It supports not just /dev/mem, but /dev/null, /dev/zero and a couple of others. It also contains the main chr_dev_init function, presumably because it's really not optional. lp, serial and tpqic02 are all longish (lp shorter than the others), full of device-specific details, well-commented and tedious.
It's really devices like this that make me want microkernels or something. Why should the kernel have to care about such tedious details of specific devices? Apparently you need to have full access to all memory and state of the system to decide whether or not the tape drive should be rewound.
While much of the resource management of the kernel makes me wish for explicit RAII, the low-level drivers, with their callbacks and interrupts, top and bottom halves etc. make me wish for some kind of explicit coroutine support. And the layered structure and asynchronous completion makes me think of microkernels and monitors/servers for the drivers. There must be a neater way of doing all this.
In any case, I've read the easy stuff, and now it's time for various terminal-ish things.
Posted 2018-08-31.