Device driver | EPFL Graph Search

Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?

Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.

In computing, a device driver is a computer program that operates or controls a particular type of device that is attached to a computer or automaton. 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 (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. 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. 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. 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.

About this result

This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.

Related publications (6)

Related people (3)

Related concepts (142)

Related courses (7)

Related lectures (71)

EE-390(a): Lab on hardware-software digital systems codesign

During the course, we cover the design of multi-core embedded systems running Linux on an FPGA. Students learn how to develop hardware-software co-design solutions for complex tasks using high-level s

CS-522: Principles of computer systems

This advanced graduate course teaches the key design principles underlying successful computer and communication systems, and shows how to solve real problems with ideas, techniques, and algorithms fr

CS-209: Computer architecture II

The course completes the introduction to computer architecture.

Virtual metrology applied to milling process

Paul Arthur Adrien Pierre Dreyfus

Production quality and process efficiency are the two main drivers that lead any industrial strategy. To ensure product quality, a duality historically existed between two approaches, namely batch sam

EPFL2022

Bayesian inference with Expectation Maximisation for the characterisation of antibiotic treatment recovery in Cystic Fibrosis

Tristan Pierre Benoit Trebaol

Main project. Chronic episodes of sudden pulmonary deterioration followed by insufficient recoveries from antibiotic treatments are the main driver of morbidity and mortality in Cystic Fibrosis (CF).

2021

USBFuzz: A Framework for Fuzzing USB Drivers by Device Emulation

Mathias Josef Payer, Hui Peng

The Universal Serial Bus (USB) connects external devices to a host. This interface exposes the OS kernels and device drivers to attacks by malicious devices. Unfortunately, kernels and drivers were de

USENIX ASSOC2020

Explores isolation mechanisms in operating systems, focusing on process separation and hardware isolation in x86 architecture.

Delves into the description and role of technical objects in society.

Explores kernel integrity, system security, and real-time system verification, emphasizing the importance of proving critical properties for building secure and timely systems.

An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also include accounting software for cost allocation of processor time, mass storage, peripherals, and other resources.

Microsoft Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for servers, and Windows IoT for embedded systems. Defunct Windows families include Windows 9x, Windows Mobile, and Windows Phone. The first version of Windows was released on November 20, 1985, as a graphical operating system shell for MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces (GUIs).