ANSI C Features

The unbundled Sun C compiler is now ANSI C compliant. Two important ANSI C features device driver writers should use are the volatile keyword and function prototyping.

volatile

volatile is an ANSI C keyword that is used to prevent the optimizer from removing what it thinks are unnecessary accesses to objects. As an example, if the device has a control register that requires two consecutive writes to get it to take action, the optimizer could decide that the first write is unnecessary since the value is unused if there is no intervening read access.

If a device driver does not use the DDI data access functions to access device registers, device registers should be declared volatile. However, if the DDI data access functions are used to access device registers, it is not necessary to use volatile.

It is not an error to declare a variable volatile unnecessarily, but it might impact performance.

Function Prototypes

ANSI C provides function prototypes. This allows the compiler to check the type and number of arguments to functions, and avoids default argument promotions. To prototype functions, declare the type and name of each function in the function definition. Then provide a prototype declaration (including at least the types) before the function is called.

Prototypes are provided for most DDI/DKI functions, so many potentially fatal errors are now caught at compile time.