Pseudo driver: Failed to process interrupt

Question

I wrote a very basic, hardware-less device driver. It is similar to the ramdisk example. I'm using 64-bit Solaris 8. The device name is "pkb" and the file pkb.conf (in /usr/kernel/drv/) has the following line:
name="pkb" parent="pseudo" instance=0;
When I execute add_drv -i "pkb" /usr/kernel/drv/sparcv9/pkb I get the following error message on the console:
unix: WARNING: Failed to process interrupt for pkb0 due to down-rev of nexus driver pseudo0
The device does however get an entry the /dev directory (/dev/pkb -> ../devices/pseudo/pkb@0:pkb)
When I execute an open() and then an ioctl() on this new device, ioctl returns a -1 yet the operation appears to work (I get the value I requested). errno = 3 after ioctl() fails. Subsequent ioctl()s do not work at all and errno = 22;
So, after spending many days on the web AND paying for Sun support, I fail to find a reference to the message "unix: WARNING: Failed to process interrupt ...."
Any ideas?

Answer 1

Hi,
Changes were made in Solaris 8 to the way bus nexus drivers process addition of interrupt handlers on sun4u. Consequently there is a check in the code to ensure the version of the nexus driver being called is at the correct level. If its not, you get the message you report.
The pseudo nexus driver doesnt support interrupts, and the check fails.
(If you like playing with kadb, the message comes from within i_ddi_intr_ctlops, which is called by (i_) ddi_add_intr.)
Have you checked the return status from ddi_add_intr? Normally if this fails you driver should then fail the attach, returning DDI_FAILURE.
To test an interrupt handler, you'll need to write a driver for a piece of hardware.
Its not obvious to me what your ioctl routine is doing. Can you post the code for it?
Hope that helps a bit.
Ralph
SUN Developer Technical Support