Device Detection Tool Design Doc has been updated.

The design doc of Device Detection Tool was updated to includes latest content of design. It is available at http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/ddtool/designdoc/ .

 

Posted at 02:11PM Feb 27, 2009 by Ye Julia Li in SDDTool  |  Comments[3]

A new release of Sun Device Detection Tool -- support any platform and provide reports for OpenSolaris 2008.11

Sun Device Detection Tool 2.2 was released a few days ago. Besides the Solaris 10, OpenSolaris, Windows, Linux 2.6 and Mac X OS it supported before, Sun Device Detection Tool 2.2 can also run on FreeBSD 6 system. Now we can say that it runs on any platforms.

The new release provides driver db for the latest OpenSolaris and Solaris 10 OS . It could help you to decide whether OpenSolaris 2008.11 or Solaris 10 10/08 can run on your hardware.

The tool also enable you to submit your system configuration information to Sun for HCL auditing purpose (for Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris users only) or data mining.

Thanks for other's mention.

Posted at 12:36PM Jan 19, 2009 by Ye Julia Li in SDDTool  |  Comments[5]

Stand-alone version of Sun Device Detection Tool 2.1 is available.

Sun Device Detection Tool is also available as a stand-alone version. The stand-alone version does not require an internet access to run as it includes the built-in driver data. Its features are same as that of the version available on the web site. 

Currently, the stand-alone version of Sun Device Detection Tool 2.1 is available at here. Download the binary package; copy it to any Solaris, Linux, Windows or Mac machine even without internet access; unpack it; and execute the corresponding script under ddtool_21_loc directory. You will get the Solaris driver availability report for the machine.

Posted at 03:55PM May 23, 2008 by Ye Julia Li in SDDTool  |  Comments[3]

Sun Device Detection Tool will provide driver information for OpenSolaris 2008.05

OpenSolaris 2008.05 is released. We can expect that much more people want to try it. Providing users the Solaris driver availability information for their devices before downloading the OpenSolaris image would be helpful for many people.

Sun Device Detection Tool will provide driver information for OpenSolaris 2008.05 in few days. The OpenSolaris driver db is coming ...

Posted at 04:32PM May 07, 2008 by Ye Julia Li in SDDTool  |  Comments[0]

Detect PCI devices on Mac OS X

On Mac OS, PCI device object could be enumerated with the 'IOPCIDevice' service. Then PCI device information could be retrieved from object properties.

To detect PCI devices on Mac OS X, the following interface needs to be imported:

OS Type	Interface	Purpose
Mac OS X	IOPCIDevice	Collecting PCI Device Information

Posted at 04:15PM Apr 25, 2008 by Ye Julia Li in SDDTool  |  Comments[0]

Sun Device Detection Tool 2.1 is released.

Sun Device Detection Tool 2.1 has been released since April 18, 2008. It is accessible from http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/hcts/device_detect.html. 

What's new of SDDTool 2.1:

1. Support Mac OS for device detection. 

2. Display the device data (vendor id, device id, class code etc.) of each detected PCI device in Solaris driver availability report.

3. Collect add-in patch info, and attached driver name of each detected PCI device automatically along with other system configuration information on Solaris OS.

4. Enable users to save the HCL submission report in HTML format on Solaris OS.

5. Provide the driver db for latest Solaris 10 and Solaris Express Developer Edition release.

 

 

Posted at 03:30PM Apr 25, 2008 by Ye Julia Li in SDDTool  |  Comments[0]

How does Sun Device Detection Tool work?

Sun Device Detection Tool is a device driver detection tool which helps users to make sure their component drivers are available on Solaris OS before adoption. It is a cross-platform utility working on Solaris, Windows and Linux OS (Mac OS is coming).

In a certain aspect, Sun Device Detection Tool is a 'predict' tool. It could predict whether those devices in you Windows or Linux system work when a Solaris OS is installed on the machine.

How does it do that? It is actually simple:
    
[1] Sun Device Detection Tool collects device data of PCI devices in users' systems.
[2] The tool compares the detected device data with a Solaris driver database which is maintained by Sun to check the Solaris driver availability status for each device.
[3] The tool generates a Solaris driver availability report to show users.

How does it collect device data of users' PCI devices?

Sun Device Detection Tool 1.0 gets the device information by running specific system commands respectively on Solaris, Linux and Windows OS as follows, and parses the output message of system commands to extract device information such as vendor id, device id, etc..

OS	System Command	Utility
Solaris OS	prtconf -pv	prtconf
Windows OS	reg query hklm\system\currentcontrolset\enum\pci /s	register.exe
Linux OS	lspci -vv -n	PCIUtilities

For this reason, Sun Device Detection Tool 1.0 depends on the availability and robustness of above system commands, and their output message format.

Sun Device Detection Tool 2.0 enhances the device data collecting method. It imports following interfaces to collect device information:

OS	Interface	Solution
Solaris OS	libdevinfo	Looking up PCI nodes in prom tree and reading device data from the nodes
Windows OS	Win32 API	Reading device data from registry through Win32 API
Linux OS	/proc/bus/pci	Scanning the file of /proc/bus/pci and reading device data from it

Sun Device Detection Tool 2.0 is a Java application, it builds a JNI binding for each of the interfaces to collect device information. The enhancement frees it from dependence of system commands.

Sun Device Detection Tool 2.0 also allows device information to be feed into it from plain text files that contain the output message of system commands listed in the first table. The received device information is scanned and parsed by Sun Device Detection Tool 2.0 to extract device data (as what Sun Device Detection Tool 1.0 did). This function enables the users to check the Solaris driver availability status for remote machines or those without Internet access.

Posted at 03:33PM Mar 18, 2008 by Ye Julia Li in SDDTool  |  Comments[0]

Sun Device Detection Tool is open source.

Sun Device Detection Tool is a device driver detection tool which helps users to determine whether their PCI devices are supported by Solaris OS.

To its history, please refer to

The Path to Sun Device Detection Tool

The first version of Sun Device Detection Tool (1.0) was released on Oct. 26, 2006. This is its web site: http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/hcts/device_detect.jsp. The latest update of it is 2.0.

The source code of Sun Device Detection Tool 2.0 is finally released. It is available at
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/ddtool/ddtool-2.0-src.tar.gz. The web site of the open source project is http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/ddtool/.

 

Posted at 03:42PM Mar 06, 2008 by Ye Julia Li in SDDTool  |  Comments[0]