Solaris platform

2006-07-04T11:32:00.000-07:00

The capabilities of the Solaris platform continue to expand to meet customer needs. The Solaris 10 release is designed to fully support both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures. The Solaris OS supports machines based on both 32-bit and 64-bit SPARC processors as well as 32-bit and 64-bit x86 platforms.

The primary difference between the 32-bit and 64-bit development environments is that 32-bit applications are based on the ILP32 data model, while 64-bit applications are based on the LP64 model. The primary difference between applications for SPARC and x86-based systems, from the driver developer's point of view, is big-endian versus little-endian translation.

To write a common device driver for the Solaris OS, developers need to understand and consider these differences.

Note: This document addresses topics related to x86 platforms only. In this document, references to 64-bit operating systems refer to the Solaris OS on machines with AMD Opteron processors.

The Solaris OS runs in 64-bit mode on appropriate hardware, and provides a 64-bit kernel with a 64-bit address space for applications. The 64-bit kernel extends the capabilities of the 32-bit kernel by addressing more than 4 Gbyte of physical memory, by mapping up to 16 Tbyte of virtual address space for 64-bit application programs, and by allowing 32-bit and 64-bit applications to coexist on the same system.

This document discusses the differences between 32-bit and 64-bit data models, provides guidelines for cleaning 32-bit device drivers in preparation for the 64-bit Solaris OS kernel, and addresses driver-specific issues with the 64-bit Solaris OS kerne

Porting Device Drivers for the Solaris

Solaris platform