Part I

Designing Device Drivers for the Solaris Platform

The first part of this manual provides general information for developing device drivers on the Solaris platform. This part includes the following chapters:

• Chapter 1, Overview of Solaris Device Drivers provides an introduction to device drivers and associated entry points on the Solaris platform. The entry points for each device driver type are presented in tables.

• Chapter 2, Solaris Kernel and Device Tree provides an overview of the Solaris kernel with an explanation of how devices are represented as nodes in a device tree.

• Chapter 3, Multithreading describes the aspects of the Solaris multithreaded kernel that are relevant for device driver developers.

• Chapter 4, Properties describes the set of interfaces for using device properties.

• Chapter 5, Managing Events and Queueing Tasks describes how device drivers log events and how to use task queues to perform a task at a later time.

• Chapter 6, Driver Autoconfiguration explains the support that a driver must provide for autoconfiguration.

• Chapter 7, Device Access: Programmed I/O describes the interfaces and methodologies for drivers to read or write to device memory.

• Chapter 8, Interrupt Handlers describes the mechanisms for handling interrupts. These mechanisms include registering, servicing, and removing interrupts.

• Chapter 9, Direct Memory Access (DMA) describes direct memory access (DMA) and the DMA interfaces.

• Chapter 10, Mapping Device and Kernel Memory describes interfaces for managing device and kernel memory.

• Chapter 11, Device Context Management describes the set of interfaces that enable device drivers to manage user access to devices.

• Chapter 12, Power Management explains the interfaces for the Power Management^TM feature, a framework for managing power consumption.

• Chapter 13, Hardening Solaris Drivers describes how to integrate fault management capabilities into I/O device drivers, how to incorporate defensive programming practices, and how to use the driver hardening test harness.

• Chapter 14, Layered Driver Interface (LDI) describes the LDI, which enables kernel modules to access other devices in the system.