Introduction to the various driver types

If we speak about writing drivers, we have to divide between kernel drivers and appserver drivers. Kernel drivers are used for hardware like soundcards, networkcards and also for file-system addons. Graphics drivers and the highlevel part of input drivers are handled by the appserver. While kernel drivers are written in C, appserver addons are written in C++. Common to both is that they are simple ELF modules, which are loaded if necessary. Unlike some UNIX systems, Syllable has a defined interface between the drivers and the kernel/appserver, which is not changed very often.

Please note that you have to be careful when writing drivers because a bug in a driver can cause the system to lock up and make it completely unusable. If you can, you should have a second Syllable installation, which you can use to remove invalid drivers.


Generated on Sat May 9 22:53:26 2009 for Syllable device driver API by  doxygen 1.5.1