Writing Device Drivers

Frame Buffer Power Management

Some devices, such as certain tape drives and frame buffers, should not lose power when their drivers are detached. A new interface, ddi_removing_power(9F), checks if a device may lose power as a result of a suspend operation. A new property, no-involuntary-power-cycles, can be specified to ensure that the device is not powered down unintentionally.

For further information about power management issues, see the ddi_removing_power(9F) and no-involuntary-power-cycles(9P) man pages.

10/01 

SPARC: Driver Hardening Test Harness

The driver hardening test harness is a Solaris device driver development tool. The test harness injects a wide range of simulated hardware faults when the driver under development accesses its hardware. This fault-injection test harness tests the resilience of a SPARC based device driver. 

For more information, see “Driver Hardening Test Harness” in the Solaris 8 Software Developer Supplement.

4/01 

High-Availability Drivers Documentation

“High-Availability Drivers” provides a detailed description of how to design drivers to support high availability through driver hardening and ensuring serviceability. This material extends information provided in the Solaris 8 Writing Device Drivers.

For more information, see “High-Availability Drivers” in the Solaris 8 Software Developer Supplement.

10/00 

Generic LAN Driver (GLD)

You can use the Generic LAN driver (GLD) to implement much of the STREAMS and Data Link Provider Interface (DLPI) functionality for a Solaris network driver. Until the Solaris 8 10/00 release, the GLD module was available only for Solaris Intel Platform Edition network drivers. Now GLD is available for Solaris SPARC Platform Edition network drivers as well.

For the 4/01 release, GLD is updated with bug fixes. 

For more information, see “Drivers for Network Devices” in the Solaris 8 Software Developer Supplement.

10/00 

Updated 4/01