Writing Device Drivers

Frame Buffer Power Management

Some devices, such as certain tape drives and frame buffers, should not lose power (even in a power cycle) when their drivers are detached. A new interface, ddi_removing_power(9F), checks if a device will 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 more information, see the ddi_removing_power(9F) and no-involuntary-power-cycles(9P) man pages.

Solaris 9 

Sun StorEdge Traffic Manager

The Sun StorEdge Traffic Manager supports multiple paths for I/O devices such as Fibre Channel-accessible storage. This feature balances the workload across multiple devices and increases reliability by redirecting requests from a failed interface card or storage device to an operational card or device. 

Solaris 9 

Driver Fault Injector Harness

The driver fault injector harness is a Solaris device driver development tool. The harness injects a wide range of simulated hardware faults when the driver under development accesses its hardware. The harness tests the impact of the test fault conditions on a SPARC based device driver. 

For more information, see the man pages th_define(1M) and th_manage(1M).

Solaris 8 1/01 

Generic LAN Driver

Driver developers 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 the Solaris operating environment SPARC Platform Edition network drivers.

For more information, see "Drivers for Network Devices" in Writing Device Drivers.

Solaris 8 10/00