In the context of an operating system, a device driver is a computer program that operates or controls a particular type of Peripheral that is attached to a computer.
A driver communicates with the device through the computer bus or communications subsystem to which the hardware connects. When a System call program invokes a subroutine in the driver, the driver issues commands to the device (drives it). 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.
Purpose
The main purpose of device drivers is to provide abstraction by acting as a translator between a hardware device and the applications or
that use it.
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.
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 optimal 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. However, in recent years, non-vendors have written numerous device drivers for proprietary devices, mainly for use with free and open source operating systems. In such cases, it is important that the hardware manufacturer provide 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.
Windows uses a combination of driver and minidriver, where the full class/port driver is provided with the operating system, and miniclass/miniport drivers are developed by vendors and implement hardware- or function-specific subset of the full driver stack.
Microsoft has attempted to reduce system instability due to poorly written device drivers by creating a new framework for driver development, called Windows Driver Frameworks (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 I/O Kit.
In Linux kernel environments, programmers can build device drivers as parts of the Linux 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, including ttyS (terminal), lp (parallel port), hd (disk), loop, and sound (these include mixer, Music sequencer, dsp, and audio).
Microsoft Windows .sys files and Linux .ko files can 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.
Privilege levels
Depending on the operating system, device drivers may be permitted to run at various different privilege levels. The choice of which level of privilege the drivers are in is largely decided by the type of kernel an operating system uses. An operating system that uses a monolithic kernel, such as the
Linux kernel, will typically run device drivers with the same privilege as all other kernel objects. By contrast, a system designed around
microkernel, such as
Minix, will place drivers as processes independent from the kernel but that use it for essential
input-output functionalities and to pass messages between user programs and each other.
On
Windows NT, a system with a
hybrid kernel, it is common for device drivers to run in either
CPU modes or
user space.
The most common mechanism for segregating memory into various privilege levels is via . On many systems, such as those with x86 and ARM processors, switching between rings imposes a performance penalty, a factor that operating system developers and embedded software engineers consider when creating drivers for devices which are preferred to be run with low latency, such as network interface cards. 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.
Applications
Because of the diversity of hardware and operating systems, drivers operate in many different environments.
Drivers may interface with:
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Computer printer
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Video adapters
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Network cards
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-
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Power management and battery management
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Local Computer bus of various sorts—in particular, for bus mastering on modern systems
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Low-bandwidth I/O buses of various sorts (for such as Computer mouse, keyboards, etc.)
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Computer storage devices such as hard disk, CD-ROM, and floppy disk buses (ATA, SATA, SCSI, SAS)
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Implementing support for different
-
-
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Digital terrestrial television tuners
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Radio frequency communication transceiver adapters for wireless personal area networks as used for short-distance and low-rate wireless communication in home automation, (such as example Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), Thread, Zigbee, and Z-Wave).
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IrDA adapters
Common levels of abstraction for device drivers include:
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For hardware:
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Interfacing directly
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Writing to or reading from a device control register
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Using some higher-level interface (e.g. Video BIOS)
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Using another lower-level device driver (e.g. file system drivers using disk drivers)
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Simulating work with hardware, while doing something entirely different
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For software:
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Allowing the operating system direct access to hardware resources
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Implementing only primitives
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Implementing an interface for non-driver software (e.g. TWAIN)
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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.
Virtual device drivers
Virtual device drivers represent a particular variant of device drivers. They are used to emulate a hardware device, particularly in
virtual machine 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.,
. The virtual device driver can also send simulated processor-level events like
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 , VLMs, and VDDs.
Open source drivers
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Graphics device driver
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Printers: CUPS
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RAIDs: CCISS
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Scanners: SANE
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Video: Vidix, Direct Rendering Infrastructure
Solaris descriptions of commonly used device drivers:
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fas: Fast/wide SCSI controller
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hme: Fast (10/100 Mbit/s) Ethernet
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isp: Differential SCSI controllers and the SunSwift card
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glm: (Gigabaud Link Module
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scsi: Small Computer Serial Interface (SCSI) devices
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sf: soc+ or social Fiber Channel Arbitrated Loop (FCAL)
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soc: SPARC Storage Array (SSA) controllers and the control device
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social: Serial optical controllers for FCAL (soc+)
APIs
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Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) – the graphic display driver architecture for Windows Vista and later.
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Unified Audio Model (UAM)
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Windows Driver Foundation (WDF)
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Declarative Componentized Hardware (DCH) - Universal Windows Platform driver
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Windows Driver Model (WDM)
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Network Driver Interface Specification (NDIS) – a standard network card driver API
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Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) – the standard Linux sound-driver interface
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Scanner Access Now Easy (SANE) – a public-domain interface to raster-image scanner-hardware
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Installable File System (IFS) – a filesystem API for IBM OS/2 and Microsoft Windows NT
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Open Data-Link Interface (ODI) – network card API similar to NDIS
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Uniform Driver Interface (UDI) – a cross-platform driver interface project
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Dynax Driver Framework (dxd) – C++ open source cross-platform driver framework for KMDF and IOKit
Identifiers
A device on the
PCI bus or USB is identified by two IDs which consist of two
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 that identifies the vendor, which may be different from the chip manufacturer.
Security
Computers often have many diverse and customized device drivers running in their operating system kernel which often contain various
Computer bug and vulnerabilities, making them a target for exploits.
A
Bring Your Own Vulnerable Driver (BYOVD) attacker installs any signed, old third-party driver with known vulnerabilities that allow malicious code to be inserted into the kernel.
Drivers that may be vulnerable include those for WiFi and Bluetooth,
gaming/graphics drivers,
and drivers for printers.
There is a lack of effective kernel vulnerability detection tools, especially for closed-source operating systems such as Microsoft Windows
A group of security researchers considers the lack of isolation as one of the main factors undermining kernel security,
See also
External links
target="_blank" rel="nofollow"> Linux Hardware Compatibility Lists and Linux Drivers
