Application-Originated Drivers

The monitor has its own set of drivers for serial ports and Ethernet. Chapter 9 discussed MicroMonitors Ethernet features. As you have seen, some of the functionality of the serial port connected to the console is made available to the application (through mon_printf() and mon_putchar() , for instance). Recall that all of MicroMonitors drivers are polled, so high performance applications probably need to override the monitor and establish new, probably interrupt-driven, drivers. Establishing new drivers is perfectly acceptable because the monitor imposes no kernel-level/ user -level restriction. Hence, interfacing to the device directly is fine. The driver interface depends on RTOS and hardware details beyond the scope of this discussion. The point is that the application is not forced to use the facilities provided by MicroMonitor (refer to Figure 3.1, page 67, for a better view of this).