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Writing Device Drivers     Oracle Solaris 11.1 Information Library
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Document Information

Preface

Part I Designing Device Drivers for the Oracle Solaris Platform

1.  Overview of Oracle Solaris Device Drivers

2.  Oracle Solaris Kernel and Device Tree

3.  Multithreading

4.  Properties

5.  Managing Events and Queueing Tasks

6.  Driver Autoconfiguration

7.  Device Access: Programmed I/O

8.  Interrupt Handlers

9.  Direct Memory Access (DMA)

10.  Mapping Device and Kernel Memory

11.  Device Context Management

12.  Power Management

13.  Hardening Oracle Solaris Drivers

14.  Layered Driver Interface (LDI)

Part II Designing Specific Kinds of Device Drivers

15.  Drivers for Character Devices

16.  Drivers for Block Devices

17.  SCSI Target Drivers

18.  SCSI Host Bus Adapter Drivers

19.  Drivers for Network Devices

20.  USB Drivers

21.  SR-IOV Drivers

Part III Building a Device Driver

22.  Compiling, Loading, Packaging, and Testing Drivers

Driver Development Summary

Driver Code Layout

Header Files

Source Files

Configuration Files

Preparing for Driver Installation

Compiling and Linking the Driver

Module Dependencies

Writing a Hardware Configuration File

Installing, Updating, and Removing Drivers

Copying the Driver to a Module Directory

Installing Drivers with add_drv

Updating Driver Information

Removing the Driver

Loading and Unloading Drivers

Driver Packaging

Criteria for Testing Drivers

Configuration Testing

Functionality Testing

Error Handling

Testing Loading and Unloading

Stress, Performance, and Interoperability Testing

DDI/DKI Compliance Testing

Installation and Packaging Testing

Testing Specific Types of Drivers

Testing Tape Drivers

Testing Disk Drivers

Asynchronous Communication Drivers

Testing Network Drivers

Testing SR-IOV Drivers

23.  Debugging, Testing, and Tuning Device Drivers

24.  Recommended Coding Practices

Part IV Appendixes

A.  Hardware Overview

B.  Summary of Oracle Solaris DDI/DKI Services

C.  Making a Device Driver 64-Bit Ready

D.  Console Frame Buffer Drivers

E.  pci.conf File

Index

Loading and Unloading Drivers

Opening a special file (accessing the device) that is associated with a device driver causes that driver to be loaded. You can use the modload(1M) command to load the driver into memory, but modload does not call any routines in the module. The preferred method is to open the device.

Normally, the system automatically unloads device drivers when the device is no longer in use. During development, you might want to use modunload(1M) to unload the driver explicitly. In order for modunload to be successful, the device driver must be inactive. No outstanding references to the device should exist, such as through open(2) or mmap(2).

The modunload command takes a runtime-dependent module_id as an argument. To find the module_id, use grep to search the output of modinfo(1M) for the driver name in question. Check in the first column.

# modunload -i module-id

To unload all currently unloadable modules, specify module ID zero:

# modunload -i 0

In addition to being inactive, the driver must have working detach(9E) and _fini(9E) routines for modunload(1M) to succeed.