How to Dig Deeper into Your PC

First you need to understand device drivers.

22:01 07 June 2021

What are Device Drivers?

 

The computer programs attached to computers that control or operate a certain type of device are are called device drivers. They are the ones that enable the computer programs and other operating systems to approach the hardware functions without the necessity you to know all the details about it. In one simple sentence, drivers provide a software interface to all the hardware devices.

 

They depend on hardware and are specific to an operating system. In order not to confuse you any further, I will state this in this way: a device drive is an application or a software module that knows to do two things. The first one is to talk to the hardware device and the second one is to talk to the applications and the operating system. If you think about drivers in this way, they are much easier to understand.

 

Another thing that you should remember is the fact that these device drivers run in a super power place in the Windows operating systems and they function at the operating system level. This means that when they run across problems they will probably crush the entire system. It is of crucial importance to use only drivers from trusted sources or vendors who offer windows driver programming. You may have not realized this so far because the Windows operating systems often come with plenty of device drivers.

 

How do Device Drivers Work?

 

There are plenty of questions that you may have already asked yourself about computers. You probably wonder how computers know to work together with all the different components connected to it, don’t you? I bet that you have at least once in your life asked yourselves how do the speakers know to play music or how does the printer know to print documents? How does the mouse know how to move the pointer is another common question that many of you have thought of. We connect different devices to the computers from different manufacturers but they still manage to work perfectly well.

 

The device drivers are the little-known heroes who make all of this possible. The drivers that easily understand us and execute what we want make all of the complex commands we are issuing every day much simpler.

 

Architecture of Device Drivers

 

Now that we have started to dig dipper in the device driver, you are probably curious to get to know more about their architecture. They are divided in two layers, at the basic level. Logical layer and a physical layer.

 

The logical layer processes the data for a class of devices while the physical layer is the one that communicates with the specific device instances.

 

Types of Device Drivers

 

Have you started to wonder about the different types of device drivers? They are classified in two main categories: Karnel device drivers and user mode device drivers.

 

The Karnel device drivers will load with the operating system into the memory as a component part of the operating system.

 

The User Mode device drivers are usually triggered during a user session on the computer.

 

I hope that you have learned something useful about device drivers, and if you know an interesting fact about them, feel free to share it with us!