test

Writing Device Drivers

Use Fixed-width Types for Hardware Registers

Many device drivers that manipulate hardware devices use C data structures to describe the layout of the hardware. In the LP64 data model, data structures that use long or unsigned long to define hardware registers are almost certainly incorrect, because long is now a 64-bit quantity. Start by including <sys/inttypes.h>, and update this class of data structure to use int32_t or uint32_t instead of long for 32-bit device data. This preserves the binary layout of 32-bit data structures. For example, change: 

struct device_regs {
        ulong_t            addr;
        uint_t             count;
};      /* Only works for ILP32 compilation */

to:

struct device_regs {
        uint32_t            addr;
        uint32_t            count;
};      /* Works for any data model */