Chapter 7. Philosophy of device drivers

Table of Contents
Simple device drivers
Managing request queues
Connecting to standard I/O
Device drivers shipped with eCos
Language choice

We start with some general comments on programming device drivers for eCos. These comments express ideas on how device drivers for eCos should be written, but some of these ideas are likely to evolve in future releases.

Simple device drivers

Most programmers who use real-time operating systems craft their own device drivers for very particular tasks, and the support they need from the kernel is a convenient way of installing interrupt handlers for the interrupts generated by their devices.