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Date:	Sun, 23 May 1999 22:26:19 PDT
From:	Steven Levine <steve53@earthlink.net >
Reply-To:	scoug-programming@scoug.com
To:	scoug-programming@scoug.com
Subject:	SCOUG-Programming: Points about the meeting the 15th

In , on 05/23/99
at 09:07 PM, Dallas Legan said:

>3) There some mention about Sun computers and device drivers that seemed
>to end with a comment that "....but that would mean they would have to
>recompile the kernal".
>Maybe I missed the point of the line of comments, maybe I'm
>making a big deal out of the obvious, but I thought recompiling the
>kernal to handle new hardware was a fairly common thing with UNIX
>systems.

Used to be. Turn out Sun/Solaris is much smarter about it. I did a bit
of research to understand how it ties together. I might yet get talked
into taking the job I mentioned. In a nutshell, Sun drivers are loadable
"as needed". The driver gets address/irq information from either the
card's firmware (all written in user friendly Forth) or configuration
files. That part that was not intuitive to me was when the IRQ's were
hooked. It's done during the driver attach() call while is similar to
OS/2's driver init() call. The driver is responsible for determining what
IRQ's the card's going to use and for telling the OS that it wants to be
put on the interrupt handler chain for that IRQ. It appears that most
SBus IRQ's are shared.

Steven

--
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Steven Levine MR2/ICE #10183
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