DDI/DKI Interfaces

In System V Release 4 (SVR4), the interface between device drivers and the rest of the UNIX kernel was standardized as the DDI/DKI. The Solaris 9 DDI/DKI is documented in Section 9 of the Solaris 9 Reference Manual Collection. This section documents driver entry points, driver-callable functions, and kernel data structures used by device drivers.

The Solaris 9 DDI/DKI, like its SVR4 counterpart, is intended to standardize and document all interfaces between device drivers and the rest of the kernel. In addition, the Solaris 9 DDI/DKI allows source compatibility for drivers on any machine running the Solaris 9 operating environment, regardless of the processor architecture (such as SPARC or IA). It is also intended to provide binary compatibility for drivers running on any Solaris 9–based processor, regardless of the specific platform architecture. Drivers using only kernel facilities that are part of the Solaris 9 DDI/DKI are known as Solaris 9 DDI/DKI-compliant device drivers.

The Solaris 9 DDI/DKI allows platform-independent device drivers to be written for Solaris 9 based machines. These shrink-wrapped (binary compatible) drivers enable third-party hardware and software to be more easily integrated into Solaris 9-based machines. The Solaris 9 DDI/DKI is designed to be architecture independent and enable the same driver to work across a diverse set of machine architectures.

Platform independence is accomplished by the design of DDI in Solaris 9 DDI/DKI. The following main areas are addressed:

• Dynamic loading and unloading of modules

• Power management

• Interrupt handling

• Accessing the device space from the kernel or a user process (register mapping and memory mapping)

• Accessing kernel or user process space from the device (DMA services)

• Managing device properties