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OpenSolaris Community: Device Drivers

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Welcome to the OpenSolaris Device Driver Community!

Here is a place to discuss device drivers in OpenSolaris. If you are responsible for developing a new driver, maintaining an existing driver, or simply want more information about how drivers work in OpenSolaris, this community is for you.

Orientation

If you are developing an OpenSolaris device driver for the first time, see Max Bruning's articles, "Introduction to Solaris Drivers" and Solaris Driver Programming" and the book Device Driver Tutorial.

See Device Driver Development Resources for a longer list of resources that you can add to.

Driver APIs

The kernel APIs for use within a device driver are documented in the section 9 man pages. Section 9E describes DDI/DKI (Device Driver Interface, Driver-Kernel Interface) driver entry points. Section 9F describes DDI/DKI kernel functions. Sections 9P and 9S describe DDI/DKI properties and data structures. OpenSolaris driver developers should use the DDI/DKI interfaces whenever possible to help ensure driver compatability with future releases of OpenSolaris. For more information, see Writing Device Drivers.

Use the device drivers discussion forum to share your opinions about new and improved APIs for drivers.

Projects

Participate

  • OpenSolaris Device Driver Discussion Group: Go to OpenSolaris Discussions, and click "Subscribe".
  • Contact us to create a new project to develop a new device driver, add links to 3rd party workable drivers, or integrate your existing drivers into OpenSolaris.
  • Post an article on the genunix.org site and tell us about it so that we can link to it from this page.
  • Improve the Writing Device Drivers book. Contribute to the WDD wiki site. Sign up and log in to gain edit privilege. Please do not use quiet save.

Activities

  • OpenSolaris Device Driver Model (coming soon) is to create driver templates to help new developers write Solaris device drivers. Also, experienced developers will help annotate well written existing drivers.
  • OpenSolaris Device Driver Contest (coming soon).

Blogs