Example Device Tree

In this example, the system builds a tree structure that contains information about the devices connected to the machine at boot time. The system uses this information to create a dependency tree with bus nexus nodes and leaf nodes.

Figure 1-2 illustrates a sample device tree for a frame buffer (SUNW,ffb), a pseudo bus nexus node, and several PCI devices associated with a PCI bus nexus node.

Figure 1-2 Example Device Tree

In Figure 1-2, the SUNW,ffb leaf node represents a system frame buffer. The pseudo bus nexus node is the parent node of any pseudo device drivers (drivers without hardware). The PCI bus nexus node is the parent node for the following children:

• ebus--the ebus bus nexus node

• hme--the Ethernet driver

• glm--the SCSI host bus adapter (HBA) nexus node

  The ebus nexus node is both the child of the PCI bus nexus node and the parent node of the following leaf nodes: fdthree (a floppy disk device), SUNW,CS4231 (an audio device) and se (a serial device). The Ethernet driver (hme) is a leaf node and therefore has no children. The SCSI HBA node (glm) has a number of disk devices as leaf nodes.

Device Drivers

Associated with each leaf or bus nexus node may be a device driver. Each driver has associated with it a device operations structure (see dev_ops(9S)) that defines the operations that the device driver can perform. The device operations structure contains function pointers for generic operations such as getinfo(9E) and attach(9E). It also contains a pointer to operations specific to bus nexus drivers and a pointer to operations specific to leaf drivers.