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driver

Device Driver

A driver is a program which is capable of correctly interfacing the operating system with a particular device, either hardware (such as a graphics card) or a virtual device.

Without a specific driver, you could not properly use most of the hardware on your computer.

How do drivers work?

When an application requests the operating system for a device, the OS in turn requests the appropriate driver for the functionality required by the application. The driver processes the request ("driving" the device as necessary), and returns the results of the operation (if any) back to the application.

This is done in the background, so the user doesn't have to do anything for this to happen (except installing the driver, of course!).

last edited (November 18, 2002) by ColdShine, Number of views: 3455, Current Rev: 2 (Diff)

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