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.