Part I Designing Device Drivers for the Solaris Platform
1. Overview of Solaris Device Drivers
2. Solaris Kernel and Device Tree
5. Managing Events and Queueing Tasks
7. Device Access: Programmed I/O
10. Mapping Device and Kernel Memory
14. Layered Driver Interface (LDI)
Part II Designing Specific Kinds of Device Drivers
Overview of the Character Driver Structure
Character Device Autoconfiguration
Device Access (Character Drivers)
open() Entry Point (Character Drivers)
close() Entry Point (Character Drivers)
Differences Between Synchronous and Asynchronous I/O
Multiplexing I/O on File Descriptors
ioctl() Entry Point (Character Drivers)
I/O Control Support for 64-Bit Capable Device Drivers
32-bit and 64-bit Data Structure Macros
How Do the Structure Macros Work?
Declaring and Initializing Structure Handles
Operations on Structure Handles
18. SCSI Host Bus Adapter Drivers
19. Drivers for Network Devices
Part III Building a Device Driver
21. Compiling, Loading, Packaging, and Testing Drivers
22. Debugging, Testing, and Tuning Device Drivers
23. Recommended Coding Practices
B. Summary of Solaris DDI/DKI Services
C. Making a Device Driver 64-Bit Ready
A character device does not have physically addressable storage media, such as tape drives or serial ports, where I/O is normally performed in a byte stream. This chapter describes the structure of a character device driver, focusing in particular on entry points for character drivers. In addition, this chapter describes the use of physio(9F) and aphysio(9F) in the context of synchronous and asynchronous I/O transfers.
This chapter provides information on the following subjects: