IBM REDP-4372-00 manual Principle of device driver injection, Software Bindings

Draft Document for Review November 15, 2007 3:27 pm 4372ch03.fm

3.2.1 The principle of device driver injection

In the point-of-sales environment the chances of having different types of hardware to deploy to is very high. In our case we had four different types of SurePOS systems each setup needed a different set of drivers. This section will go over the principle of device driver injection.

If a required device driver is not contained within the profile that is being deployed to a new target, then at best the hardware on the target will not be exploited, for example resulting in poor screen performance. At worst, the network cards will not initialize correctly, and the system will not have network access to correct the problem.

Instead of having the cloned machine image contain all the possible device drivers, Tivoli Provisioning Manager for OS Deployment adopts a different approach and allows to inject the required drivers into the image at deployment time. This means that you can always use the same image, and Tivoli Provisioning Manager for OS Deployment dynamically binds the hardware specific device driver to the deployment for your particular hardware. This process is accomplished through the uniquely set identifiers that exist on all PCI based devices.

This principle is described in full details in the IBM RedBook Deployment Guide Series: Tivoli Provisioning Manager for OS Deployment V5.1, SG24-7397.

3.2.2 Software Bindings

When a device driver software package is created, the binding rules are created automatically at the time of package creation as shown in Figure 3-16.Configuration and software bindings that are not the result of an automatic binding rule can be modified using the binding interface in the Host Monitor. Automatic binding rules are used to create bindings between configuration and hosts, or between software packages and hosts, without having to specifically bind a configuration or a software package to each host. Rules are created in configurations and software packages to determine which hosts will automatically be bound to the configuration or software package.

Chapter 3. Mass-Distributions 71