Device Drivers
Each type of device has its own unique access protocol
- special control and data registers
- locations (buffers) for data to be read/written
Device drivers = code chunks to control an i/o device
- often written in assembler
- one driver for each kind of device (disk, mouse, keyboard, display, ...)
- are core components of the operating system
Operating system hides devices behind layer of abstraction
- e.g. on Unix, user processes see them all as a stream of bytes
- processes send requests such as
open() , read() , write() ...
- receive interrupt when request is completed
For more details: see COMP2121 or ELEC2142
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