Chapter 2. The Hardware Environment

< BACK NEXT >

[oR]

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.

< BACK NEXT >