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Writing Device Drivers     Oracle Solaris 11.1 Information Library
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Document Information

Preface

Part I Designing Device Drivers for the Oracle Solaris Platform

1.  Overview of Oracle Solaris Device Drivers

2.  Oracle Solaris Kernel and Device Tree

3.  Multithreading

4.  Properties

5.  Managing Events and Queueing Tasks

6.  Driver Autoconfiguration

7.  Device Access: Programmed I/O

8.  Interrupt Handlers

9.  Direct Memory Access (DMA)

10.  Mapping Device and Kernel Memory

11.  Device Context Management

12.  Power Management

13.  Hardening Oracle Solaris Drivers

14.  Layered Driver Interface (LDI)

Part II Designing Specific Kinds of Device Drivers

15.  Drivers for Character Devices

Overview of the Character Driver Structure

Character Device Autoconfiguration

Device Access (Character Drivers)

open() Entry Point (Character Drivers)

close() Entry Point (Character Drivers)

I/O Request Handling

User Addresses

Vectored I/O

Differences Between Synchronous and Asynchronous I/O

Data Transfer Methods

Programmed I/O Transfers

DMA Transfers (Synchronous)

DMA Transfers (Asynchronous)

minphys() Entry Point

strategy() Entry Point

Mapping Device Memory

Multiplexing I/O on File Descriptors

Miscellaneous I/O Control

ioctl() Entry Point (Character Drivers)

I/O Control Support for 64-Bit Capable Device Drivers

Handling copyout() Overflow

32-bit and 64-bit Data Structure Macros

How Do the Structure Macros Work?

When to Use Structure Macros

Declaring and Initializing Structure Handles

Operations on Structure Handles

Other Operations

16.  Drivers for Block Devices

17.  SCSI Target Drivers

18.  SCSI Host Bus Adapter Drivers

19.  Drivers for Network Devices

20.  USB Drivers

21.  SR-IOV Drivers

Part III Building a Device Driver

22.  Compiling, Loading, Packaging, and Testing Drivers

23.  Debugging, Testing, and Tuning Device Drivers

24.  Recommended Coding Practices

Part IV Appendixes

A.  Hardware Overview

B.  Summary of Oracle Solaris DDI/DKI Services

C.  Making a Device Driver 64-Bit Ready

D.  Console Frame Buffer Drivers

E.  pci.conf File

Index

Chapter 15

Drivers for Character Devices

A character device does not have physically addressable storage media, such as tape drives or serial ports, where I/O is normally performed in a byte stream. This chapter describes the structure of a character device driver, focusing in particular on entry points for character drivers. In addition, this chapter describes the use of physio(9F) and aphysio(9F) in the context of synchronous and asynchronous I/O transfers.

This chapter provides information on the following subjects: