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As far as I understand it, any program gets compiled to a series of assembly instructions for the architecture it is running on. What I fail to understand is how the operating system interacts with peripherals such as a video card. Isn't the driver itself a series of assembly instructions for the CPU?

The only thing I can think think of is that it uses regions of memory that is then monitored by the peripheral or it uses the BUS to communicate operations and receive results. Is there a simple explanation to this process.

Sorry if this question is too general, it's something that's been bothering me.

Matt
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  • The question is very general, so you pretty much answered it in your 2nd paragraph. There are simply instructions that allow the CPU communicate with devices connected to it. The details depend on the particular implementation. You can try wiki on [bus](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_%28computing%29) – Norbert P. May 24 '12 at 02:13

2 Answers2

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There are simple explanations and there are truthfull explanations - choose one!

I'll try a simple one: Along the assembly instructions, there are some, that are specialized to talk to peripherials. The hardware interprets them not by e.g. adding values in registers oder writing something to RAM, but by moving some data from a register or a region in RAM to a peripherial (or the other way round).

Inside the OS, the e.g. the sound driver is responsible for assembling some sound data along with some command data in RAM, and the OS then invokes the bus driver to issue these special instructions to move the command and data to the soundcard. The soundcard hardware will (hopefully) understand the command and interpret the data as sound it should play.

Eugen Rieck
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You're basically right in your guess. Depending on the CPU architecture, peripherals might respond to "memory-mapped I/O" (where they watch for reads and writes to specific memory addresses), or to other specific I/O instructions (such as the x86 IN and OUT instructions).

Device drivers are OS-specific software, and provide an interface between the OS and the hardware.

A specific physical device either has hardware that knows how to respond to whatever signals from the CPU it monitors, or it has its own CPU and software that is often called firmware. The firmware of a device is not specific to any operating system and is usually stored in persistent memory on the device even after it is powered off. However, some peripherals might have firmware that is loaded by the device driver when the OS boots.

Greg Hewgill
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