Most device drivers maintain state information
with each instance of the device they control; for example, a soft copy of a device control register, a mutex that must be held while accessing a piece of hardware, a partition table, or a unit structure. These utility routines are intended to help device drivers manage the space used by the driver to
hold such state information.
For example, if the driver holds the state of each instance in a single state structure, these routines can be used to dynamically allocate and deallocate a separate structure for each instance of the driver as the instance is attached and detached.
To use the routines, the driver writer needs to declare a state pointer, state_p, which the implementation uses as a place to hang a set of per-driver structures; everything else is managed by these routines.
The routine ddi_soft_state_init() is usually called in the driver's _init(9E) routine to initialize the state pointer, set the size of the
soft state structure, and to allow the driver to pre-allocate a given number of such structures if required.
The routine ddi_soft_state_zalloc() is usually called in the driver's attach(9E) routine. The routine is passed an item number which is
used to refer to the structure in subsequent calls to ddi_get_soft_state() and ddi_soft_state_free(). The item number is usually just the instance number of the devinfo node, obtained with ddi_get_instance(9F). The routine attempts to allocate space for the new structure, and if the space allocation was successful, DDI_SUCCESS is returned to the caller. Returned memory is
zeroed.
A pointer to the space previously allocated for a soft state structure can be obtained by calling ddi_get_soft_state() with the appropriate item number.
The space used by a given soft state structure can be returned to the system using ddi_soft_state_free(). This routine is usually called from the driver's detach(9E) entry point.
The space used by all the soft state structures allocated on a given state pointer, together with the housekeeping information used by the implementation can be returned to the system using ddi_soft_state_fini(). This routine can be called from the driver's _fini(9E) routine.
The ddi_soft_state_zalloc(), ddi_soft_state_free() and ddi_get_soft_state() routines coordinate access to the underlying data structures in an MT-safe fashion, thus no additional locks should be necessary.
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