Chapter 7. Newbus and Resource Allocation

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Until now, we’ve examined only pseudo-devices, which provide a superb introduction to driver writing. However, most drivers need to interact with real hardware. This chapter shows you how to write drivers that do just that.

I’ll start by introducing Newbus, which is the infrastructure used in FreeBSD to manage the hardware devices on the system (McKusick and Neville-Neil, 2005). I’ll then describe the basics of a Newbus driver, and I’ll conclude this chapter by talking about hardware resource allocation.

Autoconfiguration and Newbus Drivers

Autoconfiguration is the procedure carried out by FreeBSD to enable ...

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