What is the difference between misc drivers and char drivers?

Edit: I thought you were talking about drivers/misc drivers, but I see you're refering to character drivers using misc_register (and all the API in drivers/char/misc.c). You should specify this in your question.

In this case, the misc API seems to make your life easier when you're writing a small character driver and do not want to need to allocate a new major number only to use one minor number, for example. It simplifies things, but all the file operations are still available using the fops member of struct miscdevice. The basic difference is you only get one minor number per misc device.

My previous, unrelated answer was, for the record:

Have a quick look at drivers/misc: you won't find any "misc core" out there. This means: misc is not a device class; it's just a bunch of drivers that don't fit in any other category. Things like barometers, DACs, test suites and other strange things.

Look at the top of drivers/misc/Kconfig:

## Misc strange devices#menu "Misc devices"

All the items in this Kconfig do not depend on any "misc core", but on other cores (i2c, pci, tty, etc.). Usually, when a driver is really using a driver core, you will see it in its Kconfig. For instance, pretty much all leds drivers (drivers/leds) depend on the leds class core and have this in their Kconfig node:

depends on LEDS_CLASS

Maybe misc drivers are all character drivers (I didn't check all of them), but something else would still work there, although it would probably be at the wrong place. I believe that lots of misc drivers could be moved to better places now... a veteran kernel hacker could confirm this.

So, to answer your question: misc drivers do not have to be character drivers, so the two categories are completely unrelated. A misc driver brings nothing more than a character driver because a misc driver is, again, nothing special.

Update: the Honeywell compass driver is a great example. It is small and straightforward.

It communicates with the actual compass using I²C. This device won't show up as a character device, so forget about major number 10. It will, however, appear somewhere in Sysfs, under /sys/bus/i2c/devices, like all I²C devices do. And you will see the Sysfs attributes it adds to its group, like heading0_input that will show the current compass direction when read.

So here you have it: a misc driver that's not a character driver.

Now this seems to say that misc drivers are just char drivers, but perhaps a subset of functions, and char drivers can have more than one entry point (such as an ioctl() or an open() or a read() call)

Yes,it just Charater driver, and Misc driver also have multiple entry point read(), write(), ioctl() (because in miscdevice 's structure already have filefile_operations structure)

in my understanding, when we need to write a small driver (only have one entry point or some more (2,3,... entry points) <<< mean small driver) we should use misc driver. it will prevent waste of RAM if we register new Major Number.

Now Since the kernel keeps a static table of device drivers, frivolous allocation of major numbers is rather wasteful of RAM. The Linux kernel, therefore, offers a simplified interface for simple drivers—those that will register a single entry point. Note that, in general, allocating the whole name space of a major number to every device is beneficial. This allows the handling of multiple terminals, multiple serial ports and several disk partitions without any overhead in the kernel proper: a single driver takes care of all of them, and uses the minor number to differentiate.