Chapter 2. The Hardware Environment

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Chapter 2. The Hardware Environment

CHAPTER OBJECTIVES

• Hardware Basic

• Buses and Windows 2000

• Hints for Working with Hardware

• Summary

It is a fact of life that device drivers must interact with "real" hardware. Traditionally, first-generation device drivers were written as unit test code by the hardware designers. These early drivers were then passed to hardware-savvy software engineers to produce a fully-integrated driver.

As discussed in the previous chapter, the term device driver in Windows 2000 can describe a block of code miles away from any real hardware. Sooner or later, however, a device driver author must understand hardware and the terms sufficient to drive it. This chapter gives a gentle overview of hardware found on most systems.

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