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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

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

SPARC Processor Issues

SPARC Data Alignment

Member Alignment in SPARC Structures

SPARC Byte Ordering

SPARC Register Windows

SPARC Multiply and Divide Instructions

x86 Processor Issues

x86 Byte Ordering

x86 Architecture Manuals

Endianness

Store Buffers

System Memory Model

Total Store Ordering (TSO)

Partial Store Ordering (PSO)

Bus Architectures

Device Identification

Supported Interrupt Types

Bus Specifics

PCI Local Bus

PCI Address Domain

PCI Configuration Address Space

PCI Configuration Base Address Registers

PCI Memory Address Space

PCI I/O Address Space

PCI Hardware Configuration Files

PCI Express

SBus

SBus Physical Address Space

Physical SBus Addresses

SBus Hardware Configuration Files

Device Issues

Timing-Critical Sections

Delays

Internal Sequencing Logic

Interrupt Issues

PROM on SPARC Machines

Open Boot PROM 3

Forth Commands

Walking the PROMs Device Tree

Mapping the Device

Reading and Writing

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

System Memory Model

The system memory model defines the semantics of memory operations such as load and store and specifies how the order in which these operations are issued by a processor is related to the order in which they reach memory. The memory model applies to both uniprocessors and shared-memory multiprocessors. Two memory models are supported: total store ordering (TSO) and partial store ordering (PSO).

Total Store Ordering (TSO)

TSO guarantees that the sequence in which store, FLUSH, and atomic load-store instructions appear in memory for a given processor is identical to the sequence in which they were issued by the processor.

Both x86 and SPARC processors support TSO.

Partial Store Ordering (PSO)

PSO does not guarantee that the sequence in which store, FLUSH, and atomic load-store instructions appear in memory for a given processor is identical to the sequence in which they were issued by the processor. The processor can reorder the stores so that the sequence of stores to memory is not the same as the sequence of stores issued by the CPU.

SPARC processors support PSO; x86 processors do not.

For SPARC processors, conformance between issuing order and memory order is provided by the system framework using the STBAR instruction. If two of the above instructions are separated by an STBAR instruction in the issuing order of a processor, or if the instructions reference the same location, the memory order of the two instructions is the same as the issuing order. Enforcement of strong data-ordering in DDI-compliant drivers is provided by the ddi_regs_map_setup(9F) interface. Compliant drivers cannot use the STBAR instruction directly.

See the SPARC Architecture Manual, Version 9, for more details on the SPARC memory model.