What Is Driver
What is Driver
Drivers are the executable code in your computer that help a hardware component or software application to communicate with the operating system. These pieces of code are layered together and translate between software programs and devices. As a result, they are extremely important to your computer. Here is a closer look at what a driver does.
They translate between programs and devices
Device drivers are software that act as translators between hardware devices and programs. Because software and hardware are created by different companies, drivers are essential to allowing software to talk to hardware. For example, a serial port high-level application might need to send and receive data, and the driver will implement the functions of the serial port.Device drivers are critical to operating systems, as they translate instructions between software and hardware.
They are layered together
Layered drivers are part of a stack of device drivers that process an I/O request. For example, a layered driver might intercept disk calls, encrypt data, and pass the request on to another driver. Layered drivers are often referred to as filter drivers, and they are supported by most operating systems.
They are executable code
A driver is a piece of software that enables your computer to work with a particular device. It can be in the form of an exe, dll, or sys file. These files are different from regular executables. They may be interpreted or translated into machine code that the hardware can understand.
They are layered together with other drivers
In an operating system, drivers are layered together in an abstraction called a driver stack. The driver stack consists of four different functional units, three of which are software layers. In a driver stack, higher layers control lower layers. The hierarchy flows upward for control and downward for status data. The fourth layer is called an interrupt unit, and it includes all functions related to interrupts. The interrupt unit also supports the user interface or device directly.