Overview – This Device Driver Tutorial is a hands-on guide that shows you how to develop a simple device driver for the Oracle Solaris Operating System (Oracle Solaris OS). Device Driver Tutorial also explains how device drivers work in the Oracle Solaris OS. This book is a companion to Writing Device Drivers for Oracle Solaris 11.2 . Writing Device Drivers is a thorough reference document that discusses many types of devices and drivers. Device Driver Tutorial examines complete drivers but does not provide a comprehensive treatment of all driver types. Device Driver Tutorial often points to Writing Device Drivers and other books for further information.
Audience – You should read this tutorial if you need to develop, install, and configure device drivers for the Oracle Solaris OS. You also should read this book if you need to maintain existing drivers or add new functionality to existing Oracle Solaris OS drivers. Information about the kernel provided in this book also will help you troubleshoot any problems you might encounter installing or configuring Oracle Solaris systems.
Required knowledge –
To write device drivers for the Oracle Solaris OS, you should have the following background:
Be an experienced C programmer
Have experience with data structures, especially with linked lists
Understand bit operations
Understand indirect function calls
Understand caching
Understand multithreading (see the Multithreaded Programming Guide )
Be familiar with a UNIX® shell
Understand the basics of UNIX system and I/O architecture
The most important information you need to have to write a device driver are the characteristics of the device. Get a detailed specification for the device you want to drive.
Experience with Oracle Solaris OS compilers, debuggers, and other tools will be very helpful to you. You also need to understand where the file system fits with the kernel and the application layer. These topics are discussed in this tutorial.
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