A tool for converting Linux device drivers into Solaris compatible binaries

Abstract

AbstractThe Linux operating system is quickly becoming a standard, attracting a wide user community and supporting a broad variety of applications and devices. Other vendors, such as Sun, have provided Linux‐compatible system call interfaces to their kernels, but are constrained by the lack of device support. To address this problem, we present a system (called PITS) to build device drivers, in this case for Solaris x86, from Linux source code. To accomplish this goal, we designed tools and Linux kernel emulation code to handle the myriad incompatibilities. These incompatibilities require the ability to resolve symbol conflicts, emulate internal Linux kernel data structures, handle module initialization, and generate module dependencies. With our method, we show that converting Linux device drivers is possible, but has a few technical difficulties. Issues arise with sparse documentation, external user interfaces, and modular driver implementations. There are also fundamental differences between the two operating systems, such as interrupt and DMA handling. We describe each of these issues and their current solutions to build a functional driver in the Solaris environment. Using the IOzone file system benchmark, we also demonstrate comparable performance between our generated SCSI driver set and their corresponding native counterparts. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.