Linux Device Drivers

Acknowledgments

This book isn’t completely mine: I’ve had external help both in hardware material and human support. I want to thank Mr. Dreyer of Quant-X for loaning me an Alpha computer so I could test portability of the sample code included in this book. Sun-Italia has been kind as well, by loaning me a Sparc machine; this allowed me to upgrade the box from their OS to mine. ImageNation helped by donating a PCI frame grabber, which I used to dissect PCI and DMA features.

Surely this book would never have been finished without the help of Andy Oram and Michael Johnson, and the psychological support of Federica, my girlfriend--ehm, wife. Andy has been my mighty editor, and Michael is the one who asked me to write for the Linux Journal and then sent me to Andy—if someone is guilty for this work, that’s Michael. I’d like to thank Georg van Zezschwitz, who introduced me to the fascinating world of kernel modules and helped in writing for the Linux Journal. I want to thank Silvana Ranzoli, my teacher of English at high school, for her relentless (though sometimes perceived as cruel) commitment to the benefit of her classroom. I am grateful to Ellen Siever, who fixed all the linguistic misfeatures I learned after high school; she patiently dealt with my tendency towards hackerisms and subtleties—I’m never satisfied with rewritings.

My text has been technically reviewed by Alan Cox, Greg Hankins, Hans Lermen, Heiko Eissfeldt, and Miguel de Icaza (in alphabetic order by first name). Their comments and suggestions have been very useful in pinpointing oversights and deficiencies of mine. I wish to thank them for spending their qualified time over my writing, which looks so irrelevant to their guru’s activity.

I also want to acknowledge people who allowed me to take time from ``real jobs'' to concentrate on the Linux kernel. This includes Virginio Cantoni, Alberto Biancardi, and other people in the Vision Lab at the University, as well as Davide Yachaya and the staff at systemy.it, where I help as network administrator.

Thanks also to the O’Reilly staff: David Futato, the copyeditor and production editor; Chris Reilley, the technical illustrator; Jane Ellin and Nicole Gipson Arigo for quality assurance; Seth Maislin, who produced the index; Len Muellner and Chris Maden for tools support; Edie Freedman for the cover design; Nancy Priest, who did the interior design; and Sheryl Avruch, the production manager.

Last but not least, I thank the Linux developers for their relentless work. This includes both the kernel programmers and the user-space people, who often get forgotten. In this book I chose never to call them by name in order to avoid being unfair to someone I might forget. I sometimes made an exception to this rule and called Linus by name—hope he doesn’t mind.