A comparison of Linux CAN drivers and their applications

The aim of this paper is to introduce LinCAN, a CAN driver system for Linux, developed at the Department of Control Engineering of the Czech Technical University in Prague, and to provide a thorough comparison with SocketCAN, which is the most common CAN solution for Linux nowadays. Thorough timing analysis and performance comparison with Socket CAN are presented, with several case-studies and applications of LinCAN shown in the end. LinCAN has been developed since 2003 and supports many CAN controllers from various manufacturers. It is designed with emphasis on strict real-time properties and reliability, making it ideally suitable for networked control systems (as is also demonstrated in the case-studies). LinCAN is also portable to other Operating Systems and can be used even system-less (without any OS) on less-powerful microcontrollers. A timing analysis and performance tests of both drivers were performed using various types of load with several recent Linux kernels. Obtained results indicate that LinCAN seems better suited for hard real-time applications, its performance being either better or on-par with SocketCAN in presented tests. Both LinCAN and SocketCAN drivers are completely open-source as well as our testing tools, so any researcher interested in our results is welcome to download all relevant source codes, check our testing methodology in detail and perhaps recreate our results or extend them by performing other test, providing valuable feedback and independent verification of our work.