Solaris 8 Software Developer Supplement

Detecting Faults

Any ancestor of a device driver can disable the data path to the device if it detects a fault. When PIO access is disabled, any reads from the device return undefined values, while writes are ignored. If DMA access is disabled, the device might be prevented from accessing memory, or it might receive undefined data on reads and have writes discarded.

A device driver can detect that a data path has been disabled by using the following DDI routines:

Each function checks whether any faults affecting the data path represented by the supplied handle have been detected. If one of these functions returns DDI_FAILURE, indicating that the data path has failed, the driver should report the fault by using ddi_dev_report_fault(9F), perform any necessary cleanup, and, where possible, return an appropriate error to its caller.