Hardware Basics
Regardless of the type of device being driven, there are several basic items that must be known.
How to use the device's control and status registers
What causes the device to generate an interrupt
How the device transfers data
Whether the device uses any dedicated memory
How the device announces its presence when attached
How the device is configured, preferably through software
The following sections discuss each of these topics in a general way.
Device Registers
Drivers communicate with a peripheral by reading and writing registers associated with the device. Each device register generally performs one of the following functions:
Command. Bits in these registers control the device in some way—perhaps starting or aborting a data ...
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