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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