Hardware Drivers, Do you know how they work? - [Tech Mojo]
How do hardware drivers work?
''Hardware Drivers, or Device Drivers. Is a component that operating systems (OS) use with the device its intended for. Such as a GPU or Sound card. Instead of accessing the device directly, OS's use Drivers and calls upon the functions in the driver to carry out actions on the Device. Each Device Driver exports a set of Functions. These functions contain code specific for the Device to carry out actions when called upon.''
That's how windows puts it in simple terms. Here is my interpretation of how drivers work.
Think of a Device Driver like a translator between the program your using and a device that program wants to use. The software and the hardware speak 2 different languages and the ''Driver'' allows them to communicate.
Drivers are constantly being updated. You have probably seen a popup on your desktop informing you that something needs updating. Windows in particular do this through their update manager.
Drivers take the information from the software, and basically tells the device what to do. A driver update means that driver can do this more efficiently.
Thanks to drivers, most software on the market don't need to know how to access the hardware directly. They only need to know that there is a driver their to do the leg work for it.
Take gaming for example. The software the game uses has to access the GPU. Now with thousands of games out there and hundreds of GPUs there is no way game companies can write the code to access every possible GPU out there, it would be near impossible. (and i wouldn't like to wait another 5 years for GTA V while the developers made sure it worked on all possible gpus) So instead it will call upon the Driver to send the information to your monitor.
Without drivers. Software developers would take an age to create a product that would work for all the different hardware its intended for. Its not as common now, but there is still software that directly uses hardware without drivers, but they are soon disappearing, thanks to Device Drivers.
Most of the time, Drivers come pre-installed on most Operating systems, such as windows, Mac and Android. And are on occasion updated to fix bugs, have new features or work faster to improve performance. I'm sure some of you have seen an update notice popup in the corner of your desktop at some point.
I hoped you enjoyed reading.