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14
Network Device Driver Configuration
Device driver configuration incorporates device drivers into the kernel to
make them available to system administration and other utilities. The
operating system provides two methods for configuring drivers into the
kernel: static and dynamic. We recommend that you implement your driver
products as a single binary module so that customers can statically or
dynamically configure them into the kernel.
The driver’s configure interface handles all configuration operations
either at startup (for static configuration) or at run time (for dynamic
configuration). To support configuration, you must provide a sysconfigtab
file fragment, which contains device special file and bus-specific information.
The information in the sysconfigtab file fragment is added to the
system’s /etc/sysconfigtab database when the driver is installed. The
startup procedure and the sysconfig utility use the information that the
/etc/sysconfigtab database provides to locate the driver module and to
set device attributes.
The information that you provide in the sysconfigtab file fragment
depends on the bus on which the driver operates. The following
sysconfigtab file fragment entries are bus-specific:
• PCI_Option
The PCI_Option entry specifies the option data that is associated with
the PCI bus. See
Writing PCI Bus Device Drivers for a description of the
values that you can specify with this entry.
• VBA_Option
The VBA_Option entry specifies the option data that is associated with
the VMEbus. See Writing VMEbus Device Drivers for a description of
the values that you can specify with this entry.
For more information on the sysconfigtab file fragment, as well as how
to build and either statically or dynamically link your driver, see Writing
Kernel Modules.
Network Device Driver Configuration 14–1