Applications




Because of the diversity of modernupdate hardware and operating systems, drivers operate in many different environments. Drivers may interface with:

  • Printers
  • Video adapters
  • Network cards
  • Sound cards
  • Local buses of various sorts—in particular, for bus mastering on modern systems
  • Low-bandwidth I/O buses of various sorts (for pointing devices such as mice, keyboards, etc.)
  • Computer storage devices such as hard disk, CD-ROM, and floppy disk buses (ATA, SATA, SCSI, SAS)
  • Implementing support for different file systems
  • Image scanners
  • Digital cameras

Common levels of abstraction for device drivers include:

  • For hardware:
    • Interfacing directly
    • Writing to or reading from a device control register
    • Using some higher-level interface (e.g. Video BIOS)
    • Using another lower-level device driver (e.g. file system drivers using disk drivers)
    • Simulating work with hardware, while doing something entirely different
  • For software:
    • Allowing the operating system direct access to hardware resources
    • Implementing only primitives
    • Implementing an interface for non-driver software (e.g. TWAIN)
    • Implementing a language, sometimes quite high-level (e.g. PostScript)

So choosing and installing the correct device drivers for given hardware is often a key component of computer system configuration.

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Device driver