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The system uses a service-based approach to drivers. The following components take their part in this:

  • devicemanager is the central device registry

    • libdevice is the interface library for devicemanager

  • pcidriver is the PCI driver

    • libpci is the interface library for pcidriver

  • ps2driver is a driver for PS/2 mouse & keyboard input

    • libps2 is the PS/2 implementation

    • libps2driver is the interface library for ps2driver

  • ahcidriver is the SATA/AHCI implementation

    • libahci is the interface library for ahcidriver

  • efifbdriver is the EFI framebuffer video graphics driver

  • vmsvgadriver is the VMSVGA video graphics driver

  • libvideo is a generic interface library for video drivers

An interface library contains functions used to interact with the driver and usually also the purpose-related headers.

Basic initialization

The devicemanager first interacts with pcidriver to enumerate PCI devices and then, based on available devices, starts up further driver processes.

Graphics

Depending on the available devices, one of the available video drivers is started. All video drivers implement the video driver interface defined in libvideo.

The video mode can then be initialized by using videoDriverSetMode, which is usually done by the windowserver.

Filesystem

For drives and file systems, the implementation is not finalized but the plan is to have:

  • fsdiscovery a driver that checks for filesystems on block devices that any driver (like ahcidriver) has registered

  • libblockdevicedriver a generic interfacing library for all drivers that implement block devices; must be implemented by ahcidriver

  • fatdriver a FAT filesystem driver

The idea is that fsdiscovery will wait for block devices being registered; if a new device apperas, it will use libblockdevicedriver to call ahcidriver to read the first sector of the drive. Then it will identify what filesystem is on that drive and run the respective driver.

For the FAT example, it will start fatdriver and tell it the device ID of the drive. The driver then again uses libblockdevicedriver to interact with ahcidriver to actually read/write data on the drive.