Testing on a non-dedicated machine
SCO recommends that drivers be tested
on dedicated test machines
that can easily be reinstalled
if bugs in your driver destroy the system.
During the first phases of testing,
your driver code is probably not perfect,
and bugs in the driver code may
panic or damage the system,
even parts of the system that may
seem unrelated to your driver.
On SCO systems, drivers share address space
with the rest of the system.
So the driver code itself
or commands you issue from a debugger
can damage any part of the kernel
or any process.
If using a production system to test a driver,
SCO recommends the following:
-
Testing should be done when no other
users are on the system.
-
Before installing your test driver,
make an emergency recovery floppy
and tape backup of all system and user data files.
On SVR5,
use the
emergency_disk
and
emergency_rec
commands.
-
You should also make a backup copy
of the executable kernel image (/stand/unix)
before reconfiguring the system;
the idbuild command automatically
makes a backup copy of the kernel image,
but it will be overwritten by a subsequent
idbuild command.
© 2005 The SCO Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
OpenServer 6 and UnixWare (SVR5) HDK - June 2005