May 2025
Intermediate to advanced
573 pages
14h 38m
English
Modern hardware is stunningly difficult to deal with.
— James Buchanan
Earlier chapters on I/O present a general paradigm that uses a device switch table, and explain how a device driver is organized. The previous chapter shows an example driver for a tty device, and uses the example to illustrate how the upper half and lower half interact.
This chapter extends our discussion of I/O by considering the design of device drivers for hardware devices that can transfer data from or to memory directly. The chapter presents an Ethernet device to show one example of how buffers are organized for such devices and how a device can access the buffers to perform both input and output.
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