User Background

To write device drivers for the Solaris OS, you should have the following background:

• Be a confident 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 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.