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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.

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Compaq AA-RNG2A-TE manual Network Device Driver Configuration