Developing Device Drivers

The Oracle Solaris OS includes a set of standard interfaces for developing device drivers. The interfaces are known as the DDI/DKI, or Device Driver Interface/Driver-Kernel Interface. The DDI/DKI interfaces enable you to upgrade to a new Oracle Solaris release or migrate to a new platform without recompiling your driver. These interfaces are documented in man page section 9, described in Map to the Oracle Solaris OS Man Page Collection.

The Device Driver Tutorial provides hands-on information about how to develop device drivers for the Oracle Solaris OS. This book includes step-by-step descriptions for writing, building, installing, loading, and testing simple device drivers. This book also gives an overview of the driver development environment and the tools available to develop drivers. Links to driver development resources and techniques for avoiding some driver development problems are also provided.

The Writing Device Drivers manual provides much more complete information about developing drivers for character-oriented devices and block-oriented devices. Specific devices such as network devices, USB devices, and SCSI target and HBA devices are covered as well.

The Writing Device Drivers manual includes the following additional topics:

• Multithreaded re-entrant drivers

• Driver autoconfiguration

• Programmed I/O

• Direct Memory Access (DMA)

• Power management

• Hardening drivers

• Device context management

• Compilation, installation, testing, and debugging drivers

• Guidelines for drivers for 64-bit environments

For more driver development resources, see the Device Drivers section of Software Developer Information Resources and the OpenSolaris Device Drivers Community.