Porting kernel drivers

Porting a driver is the process of modifying an existing driver to run on a different kernel or to support a different device. The ``DDI interface versioning'' is an attempt to establish an industry standard for drivers and other kernel-level code that will simplify the task of porting device drivers between UNIX operating systems. Drivers that are written for systems that do not support the DDI are not portable in the sense that user-level application programs are, but there is enough similarity between all UNIX operating systems that many drivers can be ported without a major recoding effort.

Information about porting drivers is available in the following topics of this documentation set:

• Known porting issues related to an individual function, structure, or entry point routine are presented on the manual page for that function, structure, or entry point routine.

• ``Porting drivers to DDI 8'' summarizes the issues involved in porting kernel-level drivers from SCO OpenServer 5 to SVR5 and from earlier DDI versions to DDI 8. This topic points to additional information about porting STREAMS, MDI, and SDI drivers.

• ``Porting network adapter drivers to MDI 2'' summarizes the process of porting SCO OpenServer 5 MDI drivers and SCO SVR5 1 and 2 DLPI drivers to the MDI version 2 that is defined for SVR5.

• ``STREAMS in DDI 8'' summarizes the issues involved in porting STREAMS drivers from SCO OpenServer 5 and earlier DDI versions.

• ``Porting SDI 3 drivers to SDI 4'' summarizes the issues involved in porting mass storage device drivers from earlier SDI versions and the SCO OpenServer 5 SCSI interface to SDI version 4 that is defined for SVR5.

• ``Guidelines for all kernel drivers'' describes coding practices that can enhance driver portability.

• ``Porting NFB drivers from SCO OpenServer 5 to SVR5'' summarizes the issues involved in porting X Server graphics drivers from earlier releases.