Zephyr device driver model

Keywords: zephyr device drivers Zephyr device driver model Zephyr device drivers getting started

Challenged by Zephyr's way of writing device drivers, capturing some notes here on a study of a Zephyr example project which talks to LIS2DH accelerometer on a Sparkfun Thing Plus board. Casting net wider for Zephyr device driver "How To" articles, find Jared Wolff's blog post:

• https://interrupt.memfault.com/blog/building-drivers-on-zephyr

Excerpt from Zephyr project drivers documentation:

Driver Data Structures The device initialization macros populate some data structures at build time which are split into read-only and runtime-mutable parts. At a high level we have:

 struct device {
      const char *name;
      const void *config;
      const void *api;
      void * const data;
 };

Excerpt from file ~/ncs/zephyr/include/drivers/sensor.h:

382 /**
383  * @brief Set an attribute for a sensor
384  *
385  * @param dev Pointer to the sensor device
386  * @param chan The channel the attribute belongs to, if any.  Some
387  * attributes may only be set for all channels of a device, depending on
388  * device capabilities.
389  * @param attr The attribute to set
390  * @param val The value to set the attribute to
391  *
392  * @return 0 if successful, negative errno code if failure.
393  */
394 __syscall int sensor_attr_set(const struct device *dev,
395                               enum sensor_channel chan,
396                               enum sensor_attribute attr,
397                               const struct sensor_value *val);
398 
399 static inline int z_impl_sensor_attr_set(const struct device *dev,
400                                          enum sensor_channel chan,
401                                          enum sensor_attribute attr,
402                                          const struct sensor_value *val)
403 {
404         const struct sensor_driver_api *api =
405                 (const struct sensor_driver_api *)dev->api;
406 
407         if (api->attr_set == NULL) {
408                 return -ENOSYS;
409         }
410 
411         return api->attr_set(dev, chan, attr, val);
412 }
413 

From these two code excerpts the big question is, how is dev->api assigned in early configuring code for an I2C based sensor?

./include/drivers/sensor.h:61: SENSOR_CHAN_ACCEL_XYZ, . . . hmm, this is part of a large enumeration:

 53 enum sensor_channel {
 54         /** Acceleration on the X axis, in m/s^2. */
 55         SENSOR_CHAN_ACCEL_X,
 56         /** Acceleration on the Y axis, in m/s^2. */
 57         SENSOR_CHAN_ACCEL_Y,
 58         /** Acceleration on the Z axis, in m/s^2. */
 59         SENSOR_CHAN_ACCEL_Z,
 60         /** Acceleration on the X, Y and Z axes. */
 61         SENSOR_CHAN_ACCEL_XYZ,
 62         /** Angular velocity around the X axis, in radians/s. */
 63         SENSOR_CHAN_GYRO_X,
 64         /** Angular velocity around the Y axis, in radians/s. */
 65         SENSOR_CHAN_GYRO_Y,
 66         /** Angular velocity around the Z axis, in radians/s. */
 67         SENSOR_CHAN_GYRO_Z,
 68         /** Angular velocity around the X, Y and Z axes. */
 69         SENSOR_CHAN_GYRO_XYZ,
   .
   .
   .

edit point

ted@localhost:~/projects/embedded/ncs/zephyr/samples/z--sandbox/blink-plus-uart/build/zephyr/boards/arm/sparkfun_thing_plus_nrf9160$ nm -s libboards__arm__sparkfun_thing_plus_nrf9160.a 

board.c.obj:
0000002c t $d
00000000 r $d
00000000 t $t
00000001 t board_sparkfun_thing_plus_nrf9160_init
00000000 r __init_sys_init_board_sparkfun_thing_plus_nrf9160_init0
         U z_impl_device_get_binding
ted@localhost:~/projects/embedded/ncs/zephyr/samples/z--sandbox/blink-plus-uart/build/zephyr/boards/arm/sparkfun_thing_plus_nrf9160$

File noted:

ted@localhost:~/projects/embedded/ncs/zephyr/samples/z--sandbox/blink-plus-uart/build/zephyr/dev_handles.c

ted@localhost:~/projects/embedded/ncs/zephyr/samples/z--sandbox/blink-plus-uart/build/zephyr$ ls *.c
dev_handles.c  isr_tables.c
ted@localhost:~/projects/embedded/ncs/zephyr/samples/z--sandbox/blink-plus-uart/build/zephyr$ ls *.h
ls: cannot access '*.h': No such file or directory

Example project build directory noted, this dir auto-gen'd:

ted@localhost:~/projects/embedded/ncs/zephyr/samples/z--sandbox/blink-plus-uart/build/zephyr$ ls include/generated/
app_data_alignment.ld  autoconf.h            driver-validation.h  otype-to-size.h     snippets-ram-sections.ld  snippets-sections.ld  version.h
app_smem_aligned.ld    device_extern.h       kobj-types-enum.h    otype-to-str.h      snippets-rodata.ld        syscall_dispatch.c
app_smem.ld            devicetree_fixups.h   ncs_version.h        pm_config.h         snippets-rom-start.ld     syscall_list.h
app_smem_unaligned.ld  devicetree_unfixed.h  offsets.h            snippets-noinit.ld  snippets-rwdata.ld        syscalls