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developersguide:overviewofminixdrivers

Overview of Minix 3 drivers

Drivers are software components used to manage hardware peripherals. In Minix, drivers are implemented as user-mode processes, and they use the micro-kernel to manage the hardware through it.

The drivers source code are located under the minix/drivers/ directory in the Minix source tree. The binary executables are located under the /service/ directory.

Unix device drivers

Like Unix and Unix-likes operating systems, Minix divides drivers in two categories, character and block devices, and they can be accessed just like regular files on the file system by the user-land through device nodes.

Driver types differ essentially in what services and operations they support.

Block device

A block device treats data in chunks called blocks, each block being composed of a constant number of bytes. Block devices support the seek operation, which allows access to any block at any moment.

Block devices generally represents storage media, such as hard disk and CD drives.

Character device

A character device treats data as a stream of bytes. Character devices do not support the seek operation and so do not have to actually represent a storage media or even a real hardware peripheral.

Character devices represents everything block devices cannot, from real hardware components (printers, serial ports) to virtual, abstract entities (TTY, random number generators…).

Drivers implementation

Minix drivers are processes, but unlike other processes they have permission to access their I/O ports through the micro-kernel.

Low-level protocols

Drivers interact closely with three important components and so have specialized low-level protocols for each of the virtual file server, the reincarnation server and the micro-kernel. Like all processes, drivers communicate with message passing, memory grants and system calls so those protocols are defined in those terms.

High-level abstraction libraries

Libraries were created to provide driver developers with a higher-level abstraction interface. Besides easing development, those libraries shield the drivers from low-level protocols changes to a certain extent.

The corresponding driver abstraction libraries are :

  • blockdriver : for block-oriented drivers,
  • chardriver : for generic character-oriented drivers,
  • inputdriver : for drivers communicating with the input server,
  • netdriver : for network device drivers.
developersguide/overviewofminixdrivers.txt · Last modified: 2015/04/24 23:11 by jeanbaptisteboric