Preparing for Installation

Before the driver is actually installed, all necessary files must be prepared. The driver's module name must either match the name of the device nodes, or the system must be informed that this driver should manage other names. The driver must then be properly compiled, and a configuration file must be created if necessary.

Module Naming

The system maintains a one-to-one association between the name of the driver module and the name of the dev_info node. For example, a dev_info node for a device named wombat is handled by a driver module called wombat in a subdirectory called drv (resulting in drv/wombat) found in the module path.

If the driver should manage dev_info nodes with different names, the add_drv(1M) utility can create aliases. The -i flag specifies the names of other dev_info nodes that the driver handles.

Compiling and Linking the Driver

Compile each driver source file and link the resulting object files into a driver module. For a driver called xx that has two C-language source files the following commands are appropriate:

test% cc -D_KERNEL -c xx1.ctest% cc -D_KERNEL -c xx2.ctest% ld -r -o xx xx1.o xx2.o

The _KERNEL symbol must be defined while compiling kernel (driver) code. No other symbols (such as sun4c or sun4m) should be defined, aside from driver private symbols. DEBUG may also be defined to enable any calls to ASSERT(9F). There is also no need to use the -I flag for the standard headers.

Once the driver is stable, optimization flags can be used. For the Sun WorkShop Compiler C, the normal -O flag, or its equivalent -xO2, may be used. Note that -xO2 is the highest level of optimization device drivers should use (see cc(1)).

Running ld -r is necessary even if there is only one object module.

Writing a Hardware Configuration File

If the device is non-self-identifying, the kernel requires a hardware configuration file for it. If the driver is called xx, the hardware configuration file for it should be called xx.conf. See driver.conf(4), pseudo(4), sbus(4), scsi(4), and vme(4) for more information on hardware configuration files. On the Intel platform, device information is now supplied by the booting system. Hardware configuration files should no longer be needed to provide probe(9E) arguments, even for non-self-identifying devices.

Arbitrary properties can be defined in hardware configuration files by adding entries of the form property=value, where property is the property name, and value is its initial value. This allows devices to be configured by changing the property values.