Introduction

The LinCAN driver is the loadable module for the Linux kernel which implements CAN driver. The driver communicates and controls one or more CAN controllers chips. The each chip/CAN interface is represented to the applications as one or more CAN message objects through the character device interface. The application can open the character device and use read/write system calls for CAN messages transmission or reception through the connected message object. The parameters of the message object can be modified by the IOCTL system call. The closing of the character device releases resources allocated by the application.

The present version of the driver supports three most common CAN controllers:

The intelligent CAN/CANopen cards should be supported by future versions. One of such cards is P-CAN series of cards produced by Unicontrols. The driver contains support for more than ten CAN cards basic types with different combinations of the above mentioned chips. Not all card types are held by OCERA members, but CTU has and tested more SJA1000 type cards and will test some i82527 cards in near future.