Device driver

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This article is about device drivers for hardware. For other software drivers, see
Driver (software).
In computing, a device driver is a computer program that operates or controls a
particular type of device that is attached to a computer.[1] A driver provides a
software interface to hardware devices, enabling operating systems and other
computer programs to access hardware functions without needing to know precise
details about the hardware being used.

A driver communicates with the device through the computer bus or communications
subsystem to which the hardware connects. When a calling program invokes a routine
in the driver, the driver issues commands to the device. Once the device sends data
back to the driver, the driver may invoke routines in the original calling program.
Drivers are hardware dependent and operating-system-specific. They usually provide
the interrupt handling required for any necessary asynchronous time-dependent
hardware interface.[2]

Contents
1 Purpose
2 Development
3 Kernel mode vs. user mode
4 Applications
5 Virtual device drivers
6 Open source drivers
7 APIs
8 Identifiers
9 See also
10 References
11 External links
Purpose
The main purpose of device drivers is to provide abstraction by acting as a
translator between a hardware device and the applications or operating systems that
use it.[1] Programmers can write higher-level application code independently of
whatever specific hardware the end-user is using. For example, a high-level
application for interacting with a serial port may simply have two functions for
"send data" and "receive data". At a lower level, a device driver implementing
these functions would communicate to the particular serial port controller
installed on a user's computer. The commands needed to control a 16550 UART are
much different from the commands needed to control an FTDI serial port converter,
but each hardware-specific device driver abstracts these details into the same (or
similar) software interface.

Development
Writing a device driver requires an in-depth understanding of how the hardware and
the software works for a given platform function. Because drivers require low-level
access to hardware functions in order to operate, drivers typically operate in a
highly privileged environment and can cause system operational issues if something
goes wrong. In contrast, most user-level software on modern operating systems can
be stopped without greatly affecting the rest of the system. Even drivers executing
in user mode can crash a system if the device is erroneously programmed. These
factors make it more difficult and dangerous to diagnose problems.[3]

The task of writing drivers thus usually falls to software engineers or computer
engineers who work for hardware-development companies. This is because they have
better information than most outsiders about the design of their hardware.
Moreover, it was traditionally considered in the hardware manufacturer's interest
to guarantee that their clients can use their hardware in an optimum way.
Typically, the Logical Device Driver (LDD) is written by the operating system
vendor, while the Physical Device Driver (PDD) is implemented by the device vendor.
But in recent years non-vendors have written numerous proprietary device drivers,
mainly for use with free and open source operating systems. In such cases, it is
important that the hardware manufacturer provides information on how the device
communicates. Although this information can instead be learned by reverse
engineering, this is much more difficult with hardware than it is with software.

Microsoft has attempted to reduce system instability due to poorly written device
drivers by creating a new framework for driver development, called Windows Driver
Foundation (WDF). This includes User-Mode Driver Framework (UMDF) that encourages
development of certain types of drivers�primarily those that implement a message-
based protocol for communicating with their devices�as user-mode drivers. If such
drivers malfunction, they do not cause system instability. The Kernel-Mode Driver
Framework (KMDF) model continues to allow development of kernel-mode device
drivers, but attempts to provide standard implementations of functions that are
known to cause problems, including cancellation of I/O operations, power
management, and plug and play device support.

Apple has an open-source framework for developing drivers on macOS called the I/O
Kit.

In Linux environments, programmers can build device drivers as parts of the kernel,
separately as loadable modules, or as user-mode drivers (for certain types of
devices where kernel interfaces exist, such as for USB devices). Makedev includes a
list of the devices in Linux: ttyS (terminal), lp (parallel port), hd (disk), loop,
sound (these include mixer, sequencer, dsp, and audio)...[4]

The Microsoft Windows .sys files and Linux .ko modules contain loadable device
drivers. The advantage of loadable device drivers is that they can be loaded only
when necessary and then unloaded, thus saving kernel memory.

Kernel mode vs. user mode

Device drivers, particularly on modern Microsoft Windows platforms, can run in
kernel-mode (Ring 0 on x86 CPUs) or in user-mode (Ring 3 on x86 CPUs).[5] The
primary benefit of running a driver in user mode is improved stability, since a
poorly written user mode device driver cannot crash the system by overwriting
kernel memory.[6] On the other hand, user/kernel-mode transitions usually impose a
considerable performance overhead, thereby prohibiting user-mode drivers for low
latency and high throughput requirements.

Kernel space can be accessed by user module only through the use of system calls.
End user programs like the UNIX shell or other GUI-based applications are part of
the user space. These applications interact with hardware through kernel supported
functions.

Applications
Because of the diversity of modern hardware and operating systems, drivers operate
in many different environments.[7] 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, USB, etc.)
Computer storage devices such as hard disk, CD-ROM, and floppy disk buses (ATA,
SATA, SCSI)
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[8]
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.[9]

Virtual device drivers

Virtual device drivers represent a particular variant of device drivers. They are
used to emulate a hardware device, particularly in virtualization environments, for
example when a DOS program is run on a Microsoft Windows computer or when a guest
operating system is run on, for example, a Xen host. Instead of enabling the guest
operating system to dialog with hardware, virtual device drivers take the opposite
role and emulates a piece of hardware, so that the guest operating system and its
drivers running inside a virtual machine can have the illusion of accessing real
hardware. Attempts by the guest operating system to access the hardware are routed
to the virtual device driver in the host operating system as e.g., function calls.
The virtual device driver can also send simulated processor-level events like
interrupts into the virtual machine.

Virtual devices may also operate in a non-virtualized environment. For example, a

virtual network adapter is used with a virtual private network, while a virtual
disk device is used with iSCSI. A good example for virtual device drivers can be
Daemon Tools.

There are several variants of virtual device drivers, such as VxDs, VLMs, and VDDs.

Open source drivers

graphics device driver
Printers: CUPS
RAIDs: CCISS[10] (Compaq Command Interface for SCSI-3 Support[11])
Scanners: SANE
Video: Vidix, Direct Rendering Infrastructure
Solaris descriptions of commonly used device drivers:

fas: Fast/wide SCSI controller

hme: Fast (10/100 Mbit/s) Ethernet
isp: Differential SCSI controllers and the SunSwift card
glm: (Gigabaud Link Module[12]) UltraSCSI controllers
scsi: Small Computer Serial Interface (SCSI) devices
sf: soc+ or social Fiber Channel Arbitrated Loop (FCAL)
soc: SPARC Storage Array (SSA) controllers and the control device
social: Serial optical controllers for FCAL (soc+)
APIs
Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) � the graphic display driver architecture for
Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 10.
Unified Audio Model (UAM)[13]
Windows Driver Foundation (WDF)
Windows Driver Model (WDM)
Network Driver Interface Specification (NDIS) � a standard network card driver API
Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) � as of 2009 the standard Linux sound-
driver interface
Scanner Access Now Easy (SANE) � a public-domain interface to raster-image scanner-
hardware
I/O Kit � an open-source framework from Apple for developing macOS device drivers
Installable File System (IFS) � a filesystem API for IBM OS/2 and Microsoft Windows
NT
Open Data-Link Interface (ODI) � a network card API similar to NDIS
Uniform Driver Interface (UDI) � a cross-platform driver interface project
Dynax Driver Framework (dxd) � C++ open source cross-platform driver framework for
KMDF and IOKit[14]
Identifiers
A device on the PCI bus or USB is identified by two IDs which consist of 4
hexadecimal numbers each. The vendor ID identifies the vendor of the device. The
device ID identifies a specific device from that manufacturer/vendor.

A PCI device has often an ID pair for the main chip of the device, and also a
subsystem ID pair which identifies the vendor, which may be different from the chip
manufacturer.