Man Pages

---

Back to Software Index  Manpage Top Level

Name

Availability

Description

The SBus is a geographically addressed peripheral bus present on many SPARC hardware platforms. SBus devices are self-identifying -- that is to say the SBus card itself provides information to the system so that it can identify the device driver that needs to be used. The device usually provides additional information to the system in the form of name-value pairs that can be retrieved using the DDI property interfaces. See ddi_prop_op(9F) for details.

The information is usually derived from a small Forth program stored in the FCode PROM on the card, so driver configuration files should be completely unnecessary for these devices. However, on some occasions, drivers for SBus devices may need to use driver configuration files to augment the information provided by the SBus card. See driver.conf(4) for further details.

When they are needed, configuration files for SBus device drivers should identify the parent bus driver implicitly using the class keyword. This removes the dependency on the particular bus driver involved since this may be named differently on different platforms.

All bus drivers of class sbus recognise the following properties:

reg

An arbitrary length array where each element of the array consists of a 3-tuple of integers. Each array element describes a logically contiguous mappable resource on the SBus.

The first integer of each tuple specifies the slot number the

card is plugged into. The second integer of each 3-tuple specifies the offset in the slot address space identified by the first element. The third integer of each 3-tuple specifies the size in bytes of the mappable resource.

The driver can refer to the elements of this array by index, and construct

kernel mappings to these addresses using ddi_map_regs(9F) . The index into the array is passed as the rnumber argument of ddi_map_regs().

interrupts

An arbitrary length array where each element of the array consists of a single integer. Each array element describes a possible SBus interrupt level that the device might generate.

The driver can refer to the elements of this array by index, and register

interrupt handlers with the system using ddi_add_intr(9F) . The index into the array is passed as the inumber argument of ddi_add_intr().

registers

An arbitrary length array where each element of the array consists of a 3-tuple of integers. Each array element describes a logically contiguous mappable resource on the SBus .

The first integer of each tuple should be set to

-1, specifying that any SBus slot may be matched. The second integer of each 3-tuple specifies the offset in the slot address space identified by the first element. The third integer of each 3-tuple specifies the size in bytes of the mappable resoure.

The registers

property can only be used to augment an incompletely specified reg property with information from a driver configuration file. It may only be specified in a driver configuration file.

All SBus devices must provide reg properties to the system. The first two integer elements of the reg property are used to construct the address part of the device name under /devices.

Only devices that generate interrupts need to provide interrupts properties.

Occasionally, it may be necessary to override or augment the configuration information supplied by the SBus device. This can be achieved by writing a driver configuration file that describes a prototype device information (devinfo) node specification, containing the additional properties required.

For the system to merge the information, certain conditions must be met. First, the name property must be the same. Second, either the first two integers (slot number and offset) of the two reg properties must be the same, or the second integer (offset) of the reg and registers properties must be the same.

In the event that the SBus card has no reg property at all, the self-identifying information cannot be used, so all the details of the card must be specified in a driver configuration file.

Examples

Here is a configuration file for an SBus card called SUNW,netboard. The card already has a simple FCode PROM that creates name and reg properties, and will have a complete set of properties for normal use once the driver and firmware is complete.

In this example, we want to augment the properties given to us by the firmware. We use the same name property, and use the registers property to match the firmware reg property. That way we don’t have to worry about which slot the card is really plugged into.

We want to add an interrupts property while we are developing the firmware and driver so that we can start to experiment with interrupts. The device can generate interrupts at SBus level 3. Additionally, we want to set a debug-level property to 4.

#
# Copyright (c) 1992, by Sun Microsystems, Inc.
#
#ident  "@(#)SUNW,netboard.conf         1.4     92/03/10 SMI"
name="SUNW,netboard" class="sbus"
    registers=-1,0x40000,64,-1,0x80000,1024
    interrupts=3 debug-level=4;

See Also

Warnings

The wildcarding mechanism of the registers property matches every instance of the particular device attached to the system. This may not always be what is wanted.

Table of Contents

• Name
• Availability
• Description
• Examples
• See Also
• Warnings