Training for Ankit (1)

Today I was at customers development centre. Ankit is to develop the driver for the hardware they develop. This post will record the session that I had with Ankit.

Ankit was new to kernel programming. Even I have not mastered this beast well. Neverthless, I got Ankit started with it.

1. Zaptel discussion

It is not necessary to define a span in case of an FXS/FXO. Just need to define a channel.
However, for registering fxs/fxo also, we pass a span argument to zaptel. I asked Ankit to look at span as an abstraction for a device (E1 card, FXS etc) which 'n' channels. (n = 1, for FXS)
I showed him how to define a fxo channel.
zaptel.conf
loadzone = us
defaultzone = us
fxsks=1
zapata.conf (Additions only)
signalling=fxs_ks
callerid="Green Phone"<(256) 428-6121>
channel => 1
extensions.conf additions
exten => 1000,1,Dial(Zap/1)

2. Kernel module programming

To program kernel modules, you need to have kernel source for your current kernel.
I asked him to first download LDD3.
Then, we copied the code from second chapter and compiled the module.
This had to be done on my laptop, as he did not have kernel sources installed on his system.

#include
#include
MODULE_LICENSE("Dual BSD/GPL");
static int hello_init(void)
{
printk(KERN_ALERT "Hello, world\n");
return 0;
}
static void hello_exit(void)
{
printk(KERN_ALERT "Goodbye, cruel world\n");
}
module_init(hello_init);
module_exit(hello_exit);

Then we created the makefile

obj-m += tzap.o
EXTRA_CFLAGS += -I/root/zaptel/kernel

all:
make -C /lib/modules/$(shell uname -r)/build M=`pwd` modules

With the make file in place, we compiled the module and inserted it.

1. obj-m is a variable understood by kernel build system
2. obj-m = tzap.o indicates that the name of your module source file is tzap.c
3. EXTRA_CFLAGS defines the extra compile time flags specific for your module
4. In this case that extra flag is not really necessary. But as we do more work with this driver, we will need it.
5. Make command arguments: -C Tells the make to change to before actually running
6. Make command arguments: M=`pwd`defines M, which will be used by kernel build system to determine the directory in which module source is present
7. Make command arguments: modules is the target to build

We invoke the kernel build system which in turn compiles the module for us.