Device driver development for SuperDome

[Jimmie Mayfield]

I have a customer who wants to contract me to write a device driver for a PCI device that will eventually be deployed on their Superdome (I'm afraid I don't know their SD's specs at this time).

I have some limited experience developing HPUX 11i drivers but the only platforms I have ever targetted were smaller workstation-class machines. Indeed, since we do not have a SuperDome machine at our disposal, this driver development would likely be done on a small J-class or Integrity machine.

I don't recall seeing any mention of Superdome in HP's device driver development documentation and that leads me to suspect (hope?) that a driver developed- and tested on a workstation should be functional in a Superdome assuming same OS level and processor types?

I am curious: from a device driver development point of view, is the SuperDome significantly different from other HP-UX platforms?

Any comments or insights would be helpful.

[RAC_1]

At the ouset, I do not have much experince in this feild. But a driver developed on 11.x shold be portable to 11.x
If you develop a drive on 11.23, it should not be a problem putting it on 11.23 PA-RISC ot Integrity server/superdome, unless it is very specific about hardware and those hardware details are hard-coded into driver.

Anil

[Florian Heigl (new acc)]

Jimmie,

I'd say the SD is not different to other series 800 (server) systems from driver perspective.
Until 11.00 there were different versions of HP-UX for series 700 and series 800 systems, but as far as I understood after that point all low-level-stuff got unified in the kernel, so that also should be gone.

the newer server's have OLA/R (pci hotplug, etc...) features, I do not know if You need to take care of that in the driver, but I don't think so.

[Steven E. Protter]

Going to add my two cents, and please no points.

A driver that works on an rp5450 series will work on rp74xx or rp84xx or Superdome unless the driver is specific to hardware that does not exist on the servers mentioned above.

If the PCI device will work in all the systems then the device driver should work on all the systems.

SEP

[Jimmie Mayfield]

Thanks for the responses. I'm glad to see there shouldn't be any significant differences. Thanks again.