Types of Device Drivers

There are several kinds of device drivers, each handling a different kind of I/O. Block device drivers manage devices with physically addressable storage media, such as disks. All other devices are considered character devices. Two types of character device drivers are standard character device drivers and STREAMS device drivers.

Block Device Drivers

Devices that support a file system are known as block devices. Drivers written for these devices are known as block device drivers. Block device drivers take a file system request, in the form of a buf(9S) structure, and issue the I/O operations to the disk to transfer the specified block. The main interface to the file system is the strategy(9E) routine. See Chapter 11, Drivers for Block Devices for more information.

Block device drivers can also provide a character driver interface that allows utility programs to bypass the file system and access the device directly. This device access is commonly referred to as the raw interface to a block device.

Character Device Drivers

Character device drivers normally perform I/O in a byte stream. Examples of devices using character drivers include tape drives and serial ports. Character device drivers can also provide additional interfaces not present in block drivers, such as I/O control (ioctl) commands, memory mapping, and device polling. See Chapter 10, Drivers for Character Devices for more information.

Byte-Stream I/O

The main task of any device driver is to perform I/O, and many character device drivers do what is called byte-stream or character I/O. The driver transfers data to and from the device without using a specific device address. This is in contrast to block device drivers, where part of the file system request identifies a specific location on the device.

The read(9E) and write(9E) entry points handle byte-stream I/O for standard character drivers. See I/O Request Handling for more information.

Memory Mapped Devices

For certain devices, such as frame buffers, application programs having direct access to device memory is more efficient than byte-stream I/O. Applications can map device memory into their address spaces using the mmap(2) system call. To support memory mapping, device drivers implement segmap(9E) and devmap(9E) entry points. For information on devmap(9E), see Chapter 12, Mapping Device and Kernel Memory. For information on segmap(9E), see Chapter 10, Drivers for Character Devices.

Drivers that define the devmap(9E) entry point usually do not define read(9E) and write(9E) entry points, as application programs perform I/O directly to the devices after calling mmap(2).

STREAMS Drivers

STREAMS is a separate programming model for writing a character driver. Devices that receive data asynchronously (such as terminal and network devices) are suited to a STREAMS implementation. STREAMS device drivers must provide the loading and autoconfiguration support described in Chapter 5, Driver Autoconfiguration. See the Streams Programming Guide for additional information on how to write STREAMS drivers.