What Is the Kernel?

The SunOS kernel is a program that manages system resources. It insulates applications from the system hardware and provides them with essential system services such as input/output (I/O) management, virtual memory, and scheduling. The kernel consists of object modules that are dynamically loaded into memory when needed.

The kernel provides a set of interfaces for applications to use called system calls. System calls are documented in the Solaris 2.7 Reference Manual (see Intro(2)). The function of some system calls is to invoke a device driver to perform I/O. Device drivers are loadable modules that insulate the kernel from device hardware and manage data transfers.

The remainder of this book discusses the specifics of device drivers. For details on compiling and installing a device driver, see Chapter 15, Loading and Unloading Drivers. The following sections provide additional high-level information on the SunOS operating system.

Multithreading Considerations

In most UNIX systems, the process is the unit of execution. In the SunOS 5.7 system, a thread is the unit of execution. A thread is a sequence of instructions executed within a program. A process consists of one or more threads. There are two types of threads: application threads, which run in user space, and kernel threads, which run in kernel space.

The kernel is multithreaded (MT). Many kernel threads can be running kernel code, and may be doing so concurrently on a multiprocessor (MP) machine. Kernel threads may also be pre-empted by other kernel threads at any time. This is a departure from the traditional UNIX model where only one process can run kernel code at any one time, and that process is not pre-emptable (though it is interruptible).

The multithreading of the kernel imposes some additional restrictions on the device drivers. For more information on multithreading considerations, see Chapter 4, Multithreadingand Appendix G, Advanced Topics.

Virtual Memory

A complete overview of the SunOS virtual memory (VM) system is beyond the scope of this book, but two virtual memory terms of special importance are used when discussing device drivers: virtual address and address space.

• Virtual address - A virtual address is an address that is mapped by the memory management unit (MMU) to a physical hardware address. All addresses directly accessible by the driver are kernel virtual addresses; they refer to the kernel address space.

• Address space - An address space is a set of virtual address segments, each of which is a contiguous range of virtual addresses. Each user process has an address space called the user address space. The kernel has its own address space called the kernel address space.

Special Files

In UNIX, devices are treated as files. They are represented in the file system by special files. These files are advertised by the device driver and commonly reside in the /devices directory hierarchy.

Special files may be of type block or character. The type indicates which kind of device driver operates the device.

Associated with each special file is a device number. This consists of a major number and a minor number. The major number identifies the device driver associated with the special file. The minor number is created and used by the device driver to further identify the special file. Usually, the minor number is an encoding that identifies the device the driver should access and the type of access to perform. The minor number, for example, could identify a tape device requiring backup and also specify whether the tape needs to be rewound when the backup operation is complete.

Dynamic Loading of Kernel Modules

Kernel modules are loaded dynamically as references are made to them. For example, when a device special file is opened (see open(2)), the corresponding driver is loaded if it is not already in memory. Device drivers must provide support for dynamic loading. See Chapter 5, Autoconfiguration, for more details about the loadable module interface.