Lesson 9 Device Management
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Drivers act as translators between a computer's hardware and its operating system. They allow the operating system to communicate with devices by translating electrical signals and data formats. Drivers run when their associated device is in use and help manage input/output through the use of buffers and queues, which store data temporarily to handle differences in processing speeds between devices and the CPU. Having separate driver software allows new hardware to be supported without needing to modify the operating system itself.
Lesson 9 Device Management
- 1. MODULE IN ITE229 - OPERATING SYSTEMS 18 Prepared by: For-Ian V. Sandoval LESSON 9 DEVICE MANAGEMENT The path between the operating system and virtually all hardware not on the computer's motherboard goes through a special program called a driver. Much of a driver's function is to be the translator between the electrical signals of the hardware subsystems and the high-level programming languages of the operating system and application programs. Drivers take data that the operating system has defined as a file and translate them into streams of bits placed in specific locations on storage devices, or a series of laser pulses in a printer. A driver helps the operating system communicate with the electrical signals from computer hardware. Because there are such wide differences in the hardware, there are differences in the way that the driver programs function. Most run when the device is required, and function much the same as any other process. The operating system will frequently assign high-priority blocks to drivers so that the hardware resource can be released and readied for further use as quickly as possible. One reason that drivers are separate from the operating system is so that new functions can be added to the driver -- and thus to the hardware subsystems -- without requiring the operating system itself to be modified, recompiled and redistributed. Through the development of new hardware device drivers, development often performed or paid for by the
- 2. MODULE IN ITE229 - OPERATING SYSTEMS 19 Prepared by: For-Ian V. Sandoval manufacturer of the subsystems rather than the publisher of the operating system, input/output capabilities of the overall system can be greatly enhanced. Managing input and output is largely a matter of managing queues and buffers, special storage facilities that take a stream of bits from a device, perhaps a keyboard or a serial port, hold those bits, and release them to the CPU at a rate with which the CPU can cope. This function is especially important when a number of processes are running and taking up processor time. The operating system will instruct a buffer to continue taking input from the device, but to stop sending data to the CPU while the process using the input is suspended. Then, when the process requiring input is made active once again, the operating system will command the buffer to send data. This process allows a keyboard or a modem to deal with external users or computers at a high speed even though there are times when the CPU can't use input from those sources. Managing all the resources of the computer system is a large part of the operating system's function and, in the case of real-time operating systems, may be virtually all the functionality required. For other operating systems, though, providing a relatively simple, consistent way for applications and humans to use the power of the hardware is a crucial part of their reason for existing.