Preface

Writing Device Drivers provides information on developing drivers for character-oriented devices, block-oriented devices, network devices, SCSI target and HBA devices, and USB devices for the Solaris^TM Operating System (Solaris OS). This book discusses how to develop multithreaded reentrant device drivers for all architectures that conform to the Solaris OS DDI/DKI (Device Driver Interface, Driver-Kernel Interface). A common driver programming approach is described that enables drivers to be written without concern for platform-specific issues such as endianness and data ordering.

Additional topics include hardening Solaris drivers; power management; driver autoconfiguration; programmed I/O; Direct Memory Access (DMA); device context management; compilation, installation, and testing drivers; debugging drivers; and porting Solaris drivers to a 64-bit environment.

Note - This Solaris release supports systems that use the SPARC^® and x86 families of processor architectures: UltraSPARC^® , SPARC64, AMD64, Pentium, and Xeon EM64T. For supported systems, see the Solaris OS Hardware Compatibility Lists at https://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/. This document cites any implementation differences between the platform types.