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]