You can hardly swing a cat around the embedded systems ecosystem without hitting Linux. I have tons of experience as a user of Linux, but not so with much programming drivers in kernel-space. To change that, I decided to write a sysfs platform device driver for a DHT11 humidity sensor.
Lo and behond, the Linux kernel a DHT11 driver. That’s fine. I’m really looking to practice compilation of the Linux kernel, configuration of the device tree, and module insertion. Still, just to be a little original, I decided to rewrite it as a sysfs driver which could be read through cat.
If you don’t know anything about the DHT11 sensor, it’s one of those no-protocol sensors that needs to be bit-banged. You pull it’s data line high, and it pulls the data line low in short or long pulses to indicate 0 and 1. Typically, you would drive this type of sensor by listening for edges and generating interrupts accordingly.
The sensor pulses for 0 and for 1. My BeagleBone Black clocks its MCU at . More than enough time resolution to detect these pulses. Piece of cake 🍰. That’s what I thought, at least. The events that followed saw me developing a true appreciation for Real Time Operating System (RTOS) kernels.
You see, this isn’t bare metal programming. Here, we don’t enable interrupts directly in NVIC registers. Here, we request interrupts from Linux. We don’t choose when to service our interrupts; Linux services them on it’s own sweet time. We are all at the mercy of the kernel 🙏, and Linux might not think your driver is the most important thing on it’s plate right now.
As I loaded my module and requested the temperature, I found that my driver would only detect about half the edges I saw with my logic analyzer. I knew they were there. However, it seemed like Linux did not find my driver important enough to count one edge quickly before the next edge came.
For a while, I was dejected that the Linux kernel didn’t care about my driver 😞. Fine, I thought, if you don’t care about my driver, then I don’t care about you. Why should be so courteous as to sleep and wait for another edge if you won’t even wake me up in time?! I rewrote my interrupt-based approach to a blocking, polling-based one. Guess who can now read the humidity 🌊.
P.S. Apologies to any other processes that need to wait for my blocking call. Blame the kernel 😜.