OpenVMS driver in C

[Hoff]

I'm aware of two or three folks that had thought about writing an update to the driver book, and none of these ever came to fruition.

Regardless of the available edition, you'll very likely end up using the OpenVMS source listings here, both for areas such as the V8.4-vintage I/O intercept mechanism that will probably require some digging as would other kernel changes, and there are parts of the existing driver book that have omissions and errors.

Beyond what Robert has already mentioned, I'm not aware of a public errata for the book. Those of us that have written device drivers tend to have our own errata, and I expect the authors of the driver book have similar collections of errata. (I carefully collected errata when I had thoughts there might be a third edition of the DCL book, for instance.)

[Bill Pedersen]

I fully agree with you Hoff. There is no substitute for the source listings of a particular build you are working with on developing a driver.

Thanks to all for the updates.

Bill.

[Robert Brooks_1]

V8.4-vintage I/O intercept mechanism that will probably require some digging as would other kernel changes,

--

The I/O intercept mechanism first appeared in V8.2 (and backported immediately to V7.3-2).

It has not been well-documented, although I hope to get it into the I/O User's Guide for V8.4.

For anyone who wants to "play nice" with multipath devices, the use of this supported mechanism is an absolute must.

It was developed in response to a problem with a 3rd party caching product that thought it knew more about I/O internals than it did, because multipath turned certain assumptions on its head.

-- Rob