Driver for timestamp timer

Hi,

I am a newbie to Linus and device drivers. I have a few questions -

1) Are there any drivers needed to access the on-chip memory in the linux envt.?When we try to acces the on-chip memory directly in the code, on exiting the SDK shell, we get a mesage saying "Kernel Panic ".

2) We want to use the time stamp high resolution timer in the linux envt.Are there any readily available drivers that we can download and use ?

Thank you very much for the help.

Karthik