Different driver???

[Ozguxxx]

Hi, my brother asked me why there are a lot of different device driver for every different hardware like vga or cdrom or modem on market? I am curious about this: Isnt there a standard that all these hardware suppliers apply to their products so that different devices that different suppliers produce can be driven same software? Thanx...

[chrisa128]

I'm not 100% on this but...

Yes there are standards, thats why you get the "standard" windows drivers ect...
The device should follow the standard but devices can expand past the standard which is why you get specialist drivers. For example the Ge-Force cards have processors built into them, different manufactures use different processors on these cards so to use the processor to is's fullest extent you need a special driver.

Hope this helps,

[Adek336]

A modem driver has to dial a number, transfer data, etc. A vga driver has to set video modes, draw pixels, etc. It is impossible to make one template for such a range!

If there even was a standard, it would use functions like
doSomething("CDROM-1/READ/SECTOR-0-22-3") but
doSomething("VGA/PUTPIX/123-222-33-44-12") so one driver could not handle them all.

Each device has it's own ports, commands, etc. so perhaps the driver coul be programmable; then you'd have to fill the ports, IRQ, acknowledge method, command processing so in fact the data with which you'd be capable of writing a custom driver yourself.

Adrian

[Ozguxxx]

Hi, Adek336, I think you misunderstood me. I meant to ask if there is a standard for example for vga so that we can write a driver for this standard so that we can support all the(not necessarily all but most of them) vgas on market. You know, there are different drivers for different vga or cdrom drives in market. To put simply, I write a cdrom driver, it supports most of the cdroms; I write a vga driver, it supports most of vgas, I write a hard disk driver, it supports most of hds. I am trying to know should these drivers be manufacturer specific? I hope I am clear enough now.

[chrisa128]

Ok, I been thinking. The answer is yes, if you use the bare bones of the card and don't include special support for features of cards. That is how M$ have written the Standard VGA driver which will work with any Video card but only gives 640*480*16 which is all that you can garantee to work with with any card.

Same go for the CD drives, got a doc on the ISOxxxx standard for CD-Drives and the DMA bus.

Floppy drives are all the same, look for the Standard.

Hope this helps...