Linux driver for the Microchip MCP2515 CAN controller.

This is an alternative driver (unrelated to the mcp251x driver in the mainline Linux) that uses the asynchronous SPI API directly, eliminating the overhead of threads, work queues and synchronous SPI wrappers, thus reducing SPI transaction latency to a minimum, to reduce buffer overflows.

Here are a couple of oscilloscope captures comparing the behaviour of the mcp251x driver and this mcp2515 driver, on Linux 2.6:

• Reception of 1 CAN frame:

• Reception of 4 consecutive CAN frames:

This driver is distributed as a patch file (linux-mcp2515.patch) for Linux 2.6. It was sent to the Linux Socket-CAN Core development mailing-list on 18 Oct 2010: http://socket-can.996257.n3.nabble.com/PATCH-can-mcp2515-add-spi-async-driver-for-MCP2515-td7012.html

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License in the LICENSE file for more details.