Summary

  • A serial port provides a simple means of low-bandwidth data transfer between devices. Although you can no longer find an RS-232 or RS-422 serial port on modern Macs, many USB devices present themselves as a serial port, so support for serial port drivers is still part of the Mac OS X operating system.
  • A user space application accesses a serial port through a device file in the /dev directory, as is standard for the UNIX environment.
  • A serial port driver is implemented in the I/O Kit by implementing a subclass of the IOSerialDriverSync interface. This interface contains methods for opening and closing the serial port, configuring the port, and reading and writing data.
  • The I/O Kit provides a class known as IOSerialBSDClient that publishes ...

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