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Dear Forum,

again I was suddenly understanding some part of OS theory much better as I walked in my appartment. This time it is about the communication between the kernel, drivers and processes.

For a long time I thought I could implement drivers like objects of classes. An process opening a file would call fopen(), which would then call something like FileSystem[0]->ReadFile(Buffer). Just like programming DirectX 9, getting a D3DDevice and then call methods of it to display graphics.

Man was I wrong.

The problem is, that user space processes can't just access methods and data of drivers. The drivers are either seperate processes (Microkernel) or in kernelspace (Monolith). That makes IPC (inter process communication) respectively systemcalls to the only way to interact with drivers. That way handles make really much sense now as a way to index different ressources.

For my OS I would like to have drivers as seperate processes, but running in ring 0, so they have access to kernel ressources.

Now I have just one question: How to handle multiple devices with the same driver? (like multiple AHCI devices)
Do you instantiate one process of the driver for every device? Or do you specify, that the driver has to have a way of handling multiple devices?

Best regards
Sebihepp

Funny you should mention object oriented programming, because I have always seen the file descriptor abstraction as using basically virtual methods. Yes, you call the read() system call, but what will it do? On a disk file, it will read disk file contents. On a socket, it will read from the network. On a pipe, it will block until you get bored. On a GPIO instance, it will return an error, because you are only supposed to use the ioctl() interface there.

Just because the object orientation is hidden behind the syscall veil doesn't mean it isn't there.

sebihepp wrote: ↑Wed Apr 02, 2025 9:00 am Now I have just one question: How to handle multiple devices with the same driver? (like multiple AHCI devices)

Typically you just tell the instances apart. A driver should not have global/static variables, but rather should have everything that is specific to the instance in some structure. For the specific case of user visible devices, the driver should tell the kernel that it has some device, e.g. a disk, and accessing it requires accessing the driver instance.

nullplan wrote: ↑Wed Apr 02, 2025 12:41 pm Typically you just tell the instances apart. A driver should not have global/static variables, but rather should have everything that is specific to the instance in some structure. For the specific case of user visible devices, the driver should tell the kernel that it has some device, e.g. a disk, and accessing it requires accessing the driver instance.

It is still not completely clear to me. So a driver is the implementation of a class with an additional extern "C" CreateInstance() function, that has ports and mmio addresses as parameters and returning a pointer to a newly created Instance of the class. Then the syscalls can use the object and call its methods. But then a driver is more like a dll than a process. And the kernel would be more a collection of classes with methods, that can be called by programs. That would also require that all drivers always need to be mapped into every process. And the line between kernel and driver is fading away.

The other way would be more like a Server/Client approach with message passing between processes. After the driver is loaded its main() function will be executed. In that function it uses syscalls to read its message queue and react to it. Programs then would use syscalls to pass a message to the driver and the driver answers with a message once the requested work has been done. Shared Memory could be used to exchange larger arguments.

Hmmm, That doesn't sound right. I need time to think about it and come up with alternatives.

The idea is that the driver sends all the data that identifies an instance to the kernel, to be sent back on requests. Let's take disks/volumes for example. A disk knows how big a sector is, how to read and write one, and how many there are. So you'd model it in C like this: That is as general as it gets. The kernel core then has some function And finally the AHCI driver then has its own specialization of this, like And then when the driver is instantiated, it fills out the disk structure and registers it with the core. And the functions turn the disk into an ahci_disk with the container_of macro.

That way then the rest of the kernel knows there is a disk to use, and can for example attempt to discover partitions on it. A partition abstraction can be built on top of the disk abstraction and it only has to know about partition tables, not access methods.

In C++ you'd probably be less crude about this and just use class hierarchies and virtual/abstract methods.

In microkernels you do much the same, only the driver registration must be a system call. I mean, by the time the PCI layer instantiates the driver, it cannot know what the driver will turn out to be, right? It might be a disk driver, or a serial line driver, or a graphics card driver, and the PCI layer shouldn't assume. It could also be that initialization fails, and then the driver won't be anything. Of course, in microkernels you wouldn't pass function pointers; rather the kernel would have to serialize the requests and send them to the driver on a socket or something.

sebihepp wrote: ↑Wed Apr 02, 2025 1:28 pm And the kernel would be more a collection of classes with methods, that can be called by programs.

That is part of what a kernel is. A kernel is a library for doing privileged stuff in a safe way.

sebihepp wrote: ↑Wed Apr 02, 2025 1:28 pm That would also require that all drivers always need to be mapped into every process.

In monolith land (which I'm a citizen of) that is the case anyway. And in microkernel land, the function interface is replaced with an RPC interface and the driver can be a different process.

sebihepp wrote: ↑Wed Apr 02, 2025 1:28 pm After the driver is loaded its main() function will be executed. In that function it uses syscalls to read its message queue and react to it. Programs then would use syscalls to pass a message to the driver and the driver answers with a message once the requested work has been done

Correct but incomplete. Crucially, when the kernel spawns the driver, it doesn't know what kind of driver this thing is going to be, or if it is going to be any driver at all. So the driver has to register with the kernel to tell it what it is. In this case for example that it is a disk and how big it is and how big its sectors are. That could also be the place where the communication channel is established. So if I was making a microkernel, I would adapt the above design to have as a system call. Drivers can call it and it returns a file descriptor to a socket that the kernel uses for requests.

There is always going to be a kernel core part that handles the driver instances. The AHCI driver only knows how to talk to AHCI disks, but there is a partition driver that creates the partitions, there is a file system driver that implements the FS. And these need to take disks as inputs. For example by passing the channel for the disk to them.

And applications are going to want to read and write files, so the entire thing is far removed from the actual disk driver. The application wants to do something with a file, then the VFS layer has to figure out what FS this is on, the FS layer has to figure out where to store the data on the volume. If this is on a partition, it has to add the starting offset, and only then can the disk driver get involved.