Note: This information is preliminary and subject to change. While likely to be correct, it is based on extracted diff listings of actual drivers migrating between 5.2 and 5.3, so there may be errors or omissions. Please use the information with caution. All IRIX 5.2 kernel components, including drivers and STREAMS modules, require some amount of work to migrate to IRIX 5.3. In the simplest cases, no source changes are required, but changes in the size of certain kernel structures make it necessary to recompile the same source in a 5.3 build environment.
In certain device drivers, three types of changes from the IRIX 5.2 kernel to the IRIX 5.3 kernel require some work:
This requires change in network drivers to use the new blocking scheme instead of the older splnet() blocking scheme.
The changes in drivers are to replace any calls to suser() or explicit checks of u.u_uid == 0 with a corresponding call to one of the capability check routines.
The mbuf pool is now initialized early in the system life, so drivers do not need to call mbinit().