Overview of the Solaris 7 DDI/DKI

In System V Release 4 (SVR4), the interface between device drivers and the rest of the UNIX kernel has been standardized and documented in Section 9 of the of the Solaris 2.7 Reference Manual. The reference manual documents driver entry points, driver-callable functions and kernel data structures used by device drivers. These interfaces, known collectively as the Solaris 7 Device Driver Interface/Driver Kernel Interface (Solaris 7 DDI/DKI), are divided into the following subdivisions:

• Device Driver Interface/Driver Kernel Interface (DDI/DKI) - Includes architecture-independent interfaces supported on all implementations of System V Release 4 (SVR4).

• Solaris DDI - Includes architecture-independent interfaces specific to Solaris.

• Solaris SPARC DDI - Includes SPARC Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) interfaces specific to Solaris.

• Solaris x86 DDI- Includes x86 Instruction Set Architecture interfaces specific to Solaris.

• Device Kernel Interface (DKI) - Includes DKI-only architecture-independent interfaces specific to SVR4. These interfaces may not be supported in future releases of System V. Only two interfaces belong to this group: segmap(9E) and hat_getkpfnum(9F).

The Solaris 7 DDI/DKI, like its SVR4 counterpart, is intended to standardize and document all interfaces between device drivers and the kernel. In addition, the Solaris 7 DDI/DKI is designed to allow source compatibility for drivers on any SunOS 5.7-based machine, regardless of the processor architecture (such as SPARC or x86). It is also intended to provide binary compatibility for drivers running on any SunOS 5.7-based processor, regardless of the specific platform architecture (sun4c, sun4d, sun4m, sun4u, i86pc). Drivers using only kernel facilities that are part of the Solaris 7 DDI/DKI are known as Solaris 7 DDI/DKI-compliant device drivers.

The Solaris 7 DDI/DKI allows platform-independent device drivers to be written for SunOS 5.7-based machines. These shrink-wrapped (binary compatible) drivers allow third-party hardware and software to be more easily integrated into SunOS 5.7-based machines. The Solaris 7 DDI/DKI is designed to be architecture independent and enable the same driver to work across a diverse set of machine architectures.

Platform independence is accomplished in the design of DDI portions of the Solaris 7 DDI/DKI. The following main areas are addressed:

• Interrupt handling

• Accessing the device space from the kernel or a user process (register mapping and memory mapping)

• Accessing kernel or user process space from the device (DMA services)

• Managing device properties