Question about the need for device driversFollow

Why can't device drivers be built right into the devices? Let the device itself handle it. That way it will always work and you never have to go driver hunting. It just makes more sense to me. Plug it in it works, plug it into another computer it still works. None of this setup crap. It should be modular and each piece should be independent.

Hard drives for example. Why do we need a filesystem that the OS can read? Why can't the HD have its own file system? Computer says "hey, wake up! give me this file!" (as opposed to "go to FEEB0001 and tell me what it says", "ok it said EEEA0100, go there and get what's there") HD says "Ok, hold on" Looks it up, finds it and sends it through. PC doesn't need to know where on the HD the damn file is, it just needs the file. If it worked this way, you could read any HD with any OS because the OS wouldn't need to know NTFS or EXT3 or RIESER4. It would just need to know it needed pRon1.avi.

I'm just ranting cause I can't get my new Linux and Windows box to write to each other, and my damn DVD drive won't work, but I think these are valid arguments.

I'll use MS as an example, just 'cause of the market share.

MS makes Windows Platinum. Companies put the drivers in the firmware. All is good with the world.

MS makes Windows Adamantium. Companies now have hardware out there that has unsupported drivers in the firmware, and needs to update every single piece of hardware in order to make them work with the OS before it can be installed.


Much more efficient to update driver software than firmware.

Because we would still be using 3.1.

Good point, the standard would have to be updated on a regular basis. Which of course would be a nightmare, trying to get all parties to agree on changes all the time.

Yeah I know about the FAT32 thing. I just want to share music between the 2 machines, I don't want to have to resize and format partitions on my windows box because then I'd have to move all of my music into the new partition which just doesn't work for me (as in I'm too damn lazy to do it). I managed to get it to work after writing this.

Edited, Oct 13th 2006 at 10:35am PDT by Yodabunny

Device drivers are the software component that sits between the OS and the device. You kinda can't get rid of them. Even if the Drive (for example) had its own filesystem manager on it, you'd still need one. Because you have to have a way for the OS to talk to the drive.

Let me explain this another way. You have an OS. Any OS. Within that OS, you can view files and directories. The OS itself has to decide what to do with that file, or that directory. It has to interpret the data it recieves when it opens those things and runs them. Regardless of where the filesystem itself is defined, the OS *must* do this, or it wont know what to do when you double click on that file.

You could eliminate the device driver, but then that requires that the OS know everything about every possible device that could be connected to it. This would make the OS itself *huge*. Impossibly huge. And really slow. With device drivers, we just load the ones that are needed. That way instead of having 50,000 segments of code, each 5k long, enabling us to access any of 50,000 different types of devices, we only need to load the handful we actually have hooked up to our system.


That's not to mention that putting the filesystem manager on the drive itself would be really silly. Which filesystem will you use? Doesn't my OS still have to know about the layout of data on the disk? What about different types of filesystems? You may think it's "simple" for the OS to just request a file, and the disk itself knows how to get it, but that request itself will vary based on OS. On a windows system, I might access a file as D:\myfiles\somedirectory\file_i_want. Wherase the same file in unix might be located in /home/myfiles/somedirectory/file_i_want. In order for your idea to work, the *drive* would have to know about every possible OS that might ask it for data and be able to present its filesystem to those OSes in a sane manner that each OS will understand.


It makes vastly more sense to make the HD just know about it's own layout (bytes, sectors, heads, etc). The OS only knows about what it needs to know (fileystem type, and directory paths). The device driver knows how to connect the particular OS you are using to the particular disk you're accessing. That's the modular way of doing it. And that's how it's done.